Hungry Howie’s (Portage Street)
3036 Portage StreetThe classic Friday night debate. Where am I going to get pizza from?
We have our usual Friday night place. We’ve been ordering Cottage Inn for years and it’s always crowd pleasing but J and I get tired of the same thing every week.
A lot of times if I offer up the choice, L really wants Bilbo’s. Great. I love Bilbo’s too but it gets really expensive really quickly. We don’t get nearly as much food from Bilbo’s as we do from Cottage Inn. It’s one of those hard choices. Better pizza or more pizza?
J gave me the choice this past Friday. I’ve really been craving Erbelli’s or Bimbo’s but same deal as Bilbo’s. Great pizza but we can’t get as much.
I started scanning around the other delivery places to see if I could find any deals. My family really doesn’t have a preference once we get away from Cottage Inn. I have pizzas I like but I was looking for the deal on this particular Friday night.
I ended up picking the Hungry Howie’s on Portage Street in the Milwood Neighborhood of Kalamazoo. The small, carry out only pizza place sits on an odd piece of land that runs between Portage Street and Lovers Lane. It’s right behind The Rootbeer Stand in a long yellow building that stretches the length of the space between the two roads. There are two businesses in teh building but Hungry Howie’s takes up a good portion of the available space on the west side of the property.
I put in an order online before I left work for two medium one topping pizzas using the $22 bundle deal which also include Howie Bread. I then added a Detroit Deep Dish pizza for myself, an order of Cinnamon Howie Bread and a Two Liter of Pepsi. The cost came out to less than $50 and I got more than enough pizza to last us for a couple of meals.
The store was pretty busy when I got there around 6:00 on a Friday night. There were two people manning the phones in the small carry-out lobby. When they got freed up, I told one of them I had an online order. She went to check on it but it was just coming out of the oven so I backed up against the wall to wait while they took care of the line that was slowly forming.
It really didn’t take long before the boxes were handed over to me and I was on my way home to eat.
Because I was able to get pizzas so cheaply, I got something for everyone as we all seem to like different kinds of pizza.
For B and J, I ordered a thin crust plain cheese pizza. This pizza is super thin and just covered in cheese. It made me pick a flavored crust so I tried to go with one they wouldn’t notice too much. I did the Butter Crust and no one complained. The pizza is exactly the way J and B like it but there’s no way we could have fed four of us with a thin crust pizza. I could have polished this thing off by myself in a matter of minutes. B only ate one slice at dinner but he came back the next day and had the five slices that were left for lunch.
L likes pepperoni and she has been more of a fan of regular crust. Her favorite pizza is a regular, boring Little Caesars pepperoni pizza. Knowing that, I ordered a regular crust pepperoni thinking she’d eat that one. She ate one piece and said it was too cheesy. She wasn’t a huge fan. I ended up eating quite a bit of this one over the next two days but it was almost too bready for me. There was a lot of crust and not a ton of toppings.
The pizza I ordered for myself was a pepperoni Detroit Style pizza. I really like the crunchiness of the outer edges of the Detroit style. While it’s a lot of bread, it’s not just soft, doughy bread. This pizza had that really good crunchy edge and was loaded with cheese and pepperoni on top of it. They go with the more traditional Detroit style and do a line of sauce on each piece instead of covering the whole pizza with sauce. I ate about half of this pizza on Friday night then saved the rest for snacks throughout the weekend.
I picked the 3 Cheeser Howie Bread to go with the deal. Honestly, I was surprised it gave me the option. I assumed it was just going to be the regular Howie Bread. The 3 Cheeser Bread are buttered garlic breadsticks with Parmesan, cheddar, and mozzarella cheese on top. While L didn’t really like the pizza, she really liked these. I tried to save these for her so she’d have something to eat but they were so good I had a hard time with that. I ate a few of them with the included marinara sauce but I think L ended up eating most of this box.
We always have to get dessert when we order pizza from a delivery place. I got the cinnamon Howie Bread to finish off the meal. No one will ever be able to top Cottage Inn’s Cinnamon Bread because they give you so much frosting to put on top. Hungry Howie’s bread is similar to Cottage Inn’s. They’re buttered bread sticks with cinnamon and sugar on top. They give a packet of frosting to drizzle over the top and it’s really tasty but it’s nothing like the cups of frosting Cottage Inn gives us. These are still delicious bread sticks and a great end to the meal.
I’ve always like Hungry Howie’s pizza and the meal was about a 80% success. L was the only one who would have preferred something else and I wasn’t a huge fan of the regular crust pizza I ordered for her either so I get it. Being a Michigan chain, I had never had Hungry Howie’s before we moved to Lansing in 2009. We’ve ordered from them sporadically over the years and I’ve always been happy with the pizza. The deals they had going on were too good to pass up and I’m really happy with the quality of food we got…and the quantity…for the price.
SW Michigan Dining 