BC Pizza (St Ignace)
277 N. State StreetAnyone that has ever traveled with me will tell you what a “dad traveler” I am. I hate not being in control.
I hate flying because there is literally nothing I can do when things don’t go as planned. I’m the guy that shows up to the airport three hours early because I get so anxious. I really hate not being in control.
I get that same anxiousness when I travel to Mackinac Island. I hate being at the mercy of the ferries.
When we travel to the island for work, we don’t stay on the island. Even when you add in the absolutely ridiculous ferry tickets, it’s still several hundred dollars cheaper to stay in Mackinaw City. We typically take the first ferry of the day at 7:30 AM and try to get off the island on the 6:00 ferry.
Friday night we got stuck on the island a little bit later. Our job didn’t wrap up until 7:30 PM and the last ferry off the Island was at 8:00 PM. We had to get our stuff together then get down to the ferry docks or we were going to be stranded for the night.
We made it with about ten minutes to spare so we didn’t have to sleep on the beach.
My plan for the evening was pizza. I hadn’t eaten much all day so I was really hungry. When we got back to Mackinaw City, I got on my phone to order a pizza from BC Pizza in downtown Mackinaw City. The restaurant closes at 9:00 PM but they had already shut off online ordering at 8:20. I called the restaurant and they said they weren’t taking any more orders.
There are other options. There is Mama Mia’s Pizza which closes at 9:30 and Fox’s Pizza Den which is open until 11:00. I was kind of in the mood for BC Pizza at that point though and I still had one option.
There is another BC Pizza across the Mackinac Bridge in St. Ignace. It’s on North State Street and Central Hill right on the East Moran Bay. It’s a standalone building in what I guess you can consider downtown St. Ignace. There’s a pretty big parking lot out front and I realized I wasn’t the only one wanting pizza at 9:00 at night on a Friday when I pulled in.
I put my order in on my walk back to my hotel room in Mackinaw City then got in the car and started driving. I got a text before I even got on the highway that my pizza was done. It literally took less than ten minutes.
The restaurant is divided in to three pretty distinct areas. There’s an order counter and kitchen to your left when you walk in. This was as far as I needed to go because I was just picking up an order.
That lobby that you walk in to leads in to the dining room to your right. Like most BC Pizzas, they have the lunch buffet pushed up against one wall. I was pretty surprised to see a pretty full dining room this late at night. It’s also always kind of surprising to me that BC Pizza still runs dining rooms. Most pizza places like them have switched to a mostly carry-out/delivery model but I think every BC I’ve been in to still has a dining room anchored by the pizza buffet.
I grabbed my two boxes and headed back to my hotel in Mackinaw City. The cost for a medium Extreme Carnivore pizza and an order of breadsticks was $25….plus the $8 in tolls going over the bridge.
When I travel, I typically try to order enough food that I can get two meals out of it. That’s why I added the breadsticks.
I ate those breadsticks first because I figured they wouldn’t be as good cold the next morning. I was pretty shocked when I popped open the Styrofoam container and found 10 long, rolled pieces of dough. This whole box could have been my meal. It came with marinara sauce for dipping but I also added on the jalapeno nacho cheese. I’ve mentioned this before but nacho cheese for breadstick dipping seems like a foreign concept in Michigan. It’s so popular where I grew up in East Central Illinois. I was going to get cheese bread but I saw there was a nacho cheese option for the breadsticks and went that direction instead. These breadsticks were perfect for that nacho cheese. The sticks were a little bit doughy, very bready, and a perfect vessel for getting all of that cheese out of the cup. I probably ate 8 of the 10 breadsticks before going to bed that night making sure I didn’t leave the slightest bit of cheese clinging to the plastic cup.
The pizza I ordered was the Extreme Carnivore. This pizza is topped with all the meats. Classic pepperoni, Extreme cup and char pepperoni, ham, Italian sausage, bacon, and ground beef.
When I wanted to order a pizza from BC Pizza and not one of the options, this is the pizza I wanted. The pizza had a great crispy but not burnt crust while all of the meat toppings had those smokey, crispy edges on them. I’m typically a thin crust pizza guy but this hand tossed pizza is one of the hand tossed pizzas I really like. This was worth taking a trip over the bridge to get.
I do not understand why the Mackinaw City BC Pizza closes at 9:00 on a Friday night. Then again, I don’t understand why any pizza place anywhere closes at 9:00 on a Friday night. We need a state law or something that pizza places need to be open until at least 11:00 on weekends.
It’s fine though, it cost me an extra $8 but the St. Ignace BC Pizza came through. I was looking for a tasty pizza that I could eat both for dinner and breakfast the next day. I found that along with some really tasty breadsticks.
SW Michigan Dining 