Blaze Pizza open. FREE pizza tomorrow, June 10 ...

[Robin Garr]

1. I concur with your analysis

2. However, I'm not sure which chain came first; in other words, Blaze may have been unique to the pizza category when they started, and likely still are "unique" for pizza in 97% of the country.

Fair point! I think we're on slightly different trains of thought. I was looking at the "fresh" concept with the cafeteria-style line and a dish prepared to order as you watch as a maturing concept that started with burritos, then came to tacos, and only belatedly to pizza.

As for fresh-service pizza, Blaze started in 2012 in Irvine, Calif. Uncle Maddio's started in 2009 in Atlanta. Its founder came from Moe's, so it's not hard to figure how the idea of bringing the fast concept to pizza got into his mind.

Uncle Maddio's also makes a conscious effort to do the gluten free pizza right, by avoiding cross contamination. They even have a separate container of sauce and a separate ladle that they use the spread the sauce on a GF crust. The website for Blaze warns you that they use the same press for GF dough as for wheat-based dough. That makes me a little nervous. If they don't at least clean it first, then I might as well be eating the wheat-based dough, and they might as well not even bother with gluten free. I would hope they clean it, but the website said nothing of that.

I don't get the "Fire'd." ??? What's that apostrophe doing there? What is being abbreviated and how? Fire would? Fire did? Fire had? http://realgrammar.wordpress.com/apostrophes/ No letters are being replaced or omitted (See #2)

I'm not taking free pizza from a business that doesn't even understand punctuation...

It makes about as much sense as this: KFC Yum! Center

It's like Puccini's and those creepy "smiling teeth" trying to sell me spaghetti and meatballs.

It's not showing up in the Google results now, and perhaps Puccini's changed their website domain name as well, but I accidentally landed on a site early on that was obviously not the right one- it was about people who enjoy getting bit by animals...

It makes about as much sense as this: KFC Yum! Center

I was at the Allison Krauss & Willie Nelson concert at the Waterfront last Friday. If Allison and her band made one YUM Center joke, they made a dozen. That thing is literally making a laughingstock of Louisville.

[Robin Garr]

It makes about as much sense as this: KFC Yum! Center

I was at the Allison Krauss & Willie Nelson concert at the Waterfront last Friday. If Allison and her band made one YUM Center joke, they made a dozen. That thing is literally making a laughingstock of Louisville.

Irrespective of the silly corporate moniker, it's bad architecture, a gigantic replica of either a toaster oven or an old dot-matrix printer, or perhaps the offspring of an unnatural union between those two things. And the rows of little corporate icons slapped on the walls make it look like a Windows XP desktop.

And don't even get me started about Yum's balance-sheet mentality leading all their brands on a race to the bottom as far as quality is concerned.

If country-western folk are mocking you, you know you have problems...

MarieP, the "smiling teeth" are conspicuously absent from the St. Matthews location (thankfully), but it is a BIG part of their brand identity. Bizarre. (be careful out there in the wilds of the interweb)

Irrespective of the silly corporate moniker, it's bad architecture, a gigantic replica of either a toaster oven or an old dot-matrix printer, or perhaps the offspring of an unnatural union between those two things. And the rows of little corporate icons slapped on the walls make it look like a Windows XP desktop.

Thanks Robin! You've added a couple of other names that I hadn't heard of before for that monstrosity! I had the dotmatrix printer comparison more of the XP desktop but the desktop is certainly a very appropriate description!

We were in the area so we decided to try Blaze for lunch today. It's a very nice laid out facility with lots of eager to help employees working. We gather about 1 o'clock and there was a short line but nothing unmanageable and plenty of seating available. The process is very simple to order your pizza, you just go down the line like you would at Subway, Moes, Qdoba, etc. and tell the employees what you want on your pizza. An 11 inch pie is $7.69 for a number of toppings. They say the pizza cook in 180 seconds which is about right because by the time you get your drink your pizza is ready!

As far as quality goes, the toppings all appear to be very good quality and the finished pie was quite good. The crust is thin but not really crispy nor was it soggy. I certainly wouldn't compare it at all to Coal's in any way except for the size of the finished pie unlike one of the previous posters.

Will we go there again, probably. But we go out of our way to go there for pizza, definitely not. It's just one of many local choices for a decent filling lunch at a reasonable price.

We had lunch at Blaze today, and really, really liked it. Thin crust, blisters from the heat on top, fresh ingredients, and can't beat the speed. Liked the decor and it was very clean. Of course all the line prep people were wearing the required gloves and picking up food, then the handles of the peels, then food, then wiping that hand on their apron cause it had cheese stuck to it . . . (I could rant about the folly of gloves all day long. But I digress.) We both would have given it a perfect score, until the music blasted on. Turn down the *&^%*& music. We will be back. We made a morning of wandering around World Market (I'd never been there), Trader Joe's and Blaze. Now, if there was only a bookstore . . .

. Now, if there was only a bookstore . . .

I was under the impression that no one under 50 actually read (real) "books" anymore...I thought all the cool kids were now just "downloading material" to their "device".

I resemble that remark. I am tethered to my Kindle, tablet and phone. They have nearly become body parts. And just to bring this back to food - pizza!