Blaze Pizza is burning up the franchise map LEO's Eats with Robin Garr"My name is Robin, and I am a pizza snob."
There. I said it, and I'm not even sorry.
I used to be an anti-snob, as I still tend to be about wine, and jewelry, and cars, and a lot of other earthly possessions some people acquire to support their sense of identity and purpose. I don't drive a Beemer or Lexus, I don't wear a Rolex, I don't drink Dom Perignon.
But where I once laughed at refugee friends from the Northeastern metropoli who would bang on about bloated, overloaded Louisville-style pizza resembling giant disks of cheesy casserole, I have slithered over to the side of darkness. A few years of living in New York City and a regular practice of food and wine trips to Italy will do that, I guess.
But I do try not to be a fundamentalist about it. After all, just about any pizza is better than no pizza at all. I'll try any pizza once, and if it's local, I may even give it a second chance.
So say hello to Blaze Pizza, which opened the week before last in St. Matthews Plaza (neighbor to Trader Joe's and Penzey's) amid considerable publicity and hordes lured by an honest offer of free pizza all day.
Blaze is a chain, but the Pasadena, Calif.-based outfit claims a strong Louisville tie with onetime U of L and NBA hoops star Ulysses "Junior" Bridgeman and James and Jim Patterson among others at the wheel of the regional franchise. It's coming on fast, too, having only 10 properties across the nation last year but aiming to add 45 more in 2014 in pursuit of a 230-unit spread, according to trade publication
Franchise Chatter.
And let's face it, it's a pretty good pie: cracker-crisp and sweetly charry, so paper-thin that a whole personal pie packs only 384 crust calories. With a production line based on custom-built product made while you watch and slapped into a blazing hot "Fast Fire'd" oven (no charge for the extra apostrophe), they can have your pizza sizzling in front of you in three minutes or so.
Read the full review on LouisvilleHotBytes,
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/blaze ... nchise-mapAnd in LEO Weekly:
http://leoweekly.com/dining/blaze-pizza ... nchise-mapBlaze Pizza4600 Shelbyville Road
895-7800
http://blazepizza.comRobin Garr's rating: 80 points