Uno Pizzeria & Grill (Dedham)
270 Providence HighwayI will never understand why pizza places close at 9 PM.
My colleague and I were leaving The Skating Club of Boston around 9:30 PM and we were both pretty hungry. We could have just went back to our hotel and went to Tavern in the Square again but he actually suggested pizza.
I had already been doing the homework on that and pretty much all of the pizza places in Dedham and Norwood closed at 9 PM. There was only one that was still open. I threw that out there and it sounded good enough for both us so that’s what we did.
Uno Pizzeria & Grill is on Providence Highway north of Washington Street in the Boston suburb of Dedham. The standalone restaurant is just north of the Dedham Mall with a few other chain restaurants in the area. The Chicago based pizza chain has been at this location for well over fifteen years and has undergone a few upgrades over the years as the aesthetic for the chain has changed.
We walked in to the building just before 10:00 and there weren’t many other people there. The host stand was empty so we just headed to the bar where most of the other patrons were. The bar is a big horse shoe shaped bar in the middle of the space with large TV’s hanging in the middle. The Tigers game was on a national channel and on one of the TV’s on the other side from where we were sitting. We were going to move but the bartender said she’d just put the game on a different TV. The crowd on the other side seemed to be watching a movie so this way we wouldn’t bother them watching the game.
The restaurant has kind of a dark aesthetic which tracks with Uno’s original locations in Chicago. There is a lot of dark wood and low lighting. The building looks like a cookie cutter chain restaurant from the outside but once inside, you do get more of that downtown Chicago type feeling. It’s not an exact replica. It does still have a bit of a chain restaurant feel to it but it also has a bit of the feel of a worn over time pizza joint
My colleague actually called ahead and put in an order for pizzas so they’d be ready when we got there. That caused a bit of confusion because the person he talked to on the phone (the hostess) wasn’t in the room when we got there and it took some explaining to the bartender as to what we did. The hostess was going to put us at a table but we had already sat down so they had to do some figuring out over who was going to get the check, etc.
While they were figuring that out, we ordered some beers. That was really the reason we didn’t just take it to go and eat back at the hotel.
I didn’t see a beer list but I could kinda see the taps at the end of the bar. I asked what the Goose Island one was because it looked like it was the IPA tap. She said that’s what it was so I ordered one of those. A very Chicago beer in a Chicago pizza chain. There was probably something local but I didn’t ask for a beer menu.
Like I said, co-worker called in the order so I didn’t get a chance to look at the menu. In Chicago, I would have gotten a pizza with Italian beef and giardiniera but I didn’t know if they would have that in Massachusetts (looking at online ordering now, they don’t), so I kept it simple and just ordered a thin crust pepperoni pizza.
If you follow this blog, you know when it comes to Chicago pizza, I prefer the thin crust tavern style to the Deep Dish. I like the deep dish but Tavern style is where it’s at. Unfortunately, this pizza was way, way undercooked. It was still tasty but there was no crispiness to the crust at all. It was all very floppy and didn’t hold up at all to the toppings. I ate about 3/4 of the pizza (like I said, it was tasty) and took the rest back to the hotel for breakfast. It was actually really good leftover pizza because the crust firmed up as it cooled down.
The bill for the pizza and beer was about $35.
As far as chains go, Uno isn’t a bad one. The pizza wasn’t great but only because it was undercooked. We really needed something to eat and there isn’t a lot of places open past 9:00 for some reason. I was really happy we were still able to get a pizza and get a beer along with it.
SW Michigan Dining 