Angelo’s Italian Eatery
5401 Portage RoadWe have a couple of weekend with no skating competitions.
It was a little weird. We’ve been traveling through most of the month of April on weekends so when we finally got one at home, we didn’t really know what to do with ourselves (spoiler alert, I laid on the couch most of the weekend.)
The kids still had practice on Friday night but they were pretty much done by the time I got off work. I texted J as I was walking out of the office and said I was going to pick up pizza for dinner.
I’ve been trying to branch out a little bit more with our pizza orders. We’ve had a pretty regular order from Cottage Inn for years but I think everyone was getting tired of that. I’ve gone with some of the other chains recently and tried a new place or two. I keep telling myself I need to go back and revisit some of those places I haven’t been to in years.
One of those places is Angelo’s Italian Eatery on Portage Road near the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport. The small pizzeria is in a shopping plaza right at the entrance of the airport. The restaurant has been around as long as I’ve been in Kalamazoo. The last time I blogged about it was back in 2012 but we didn’t have the pizza then. There used to be another location in Kalamazoo Township. First it was at the BP (now Shell) station on Ravine Road then it moved across the street. That location is now closed and this location on Portage Road is actually under new ownership.
Angelo’s doesn’t have online ordering so I had to call it in like it’s still the 1990’s. The thing I always loved about Angelo’s was the grinders. The pizza grinder was one of my favorite sandwiches and I’ve been wanting to pick one up for quite a while. The price is throwing me off right now though. If you go back to my old blog posts, I used to get that 16″ grinder for $11. The same sandwich is now almost $25. Inflation, man……
I figured I had never had the pizzas from Angelo’s and that would actually be cheaper than the sandwich and would feed more people. I ordered a large pepperoni pizza, a medium cheese pizza and a medium order of Wacky Bread with Cheese. The lady taking my order also convinced me to add on the dill dip for the Wacky Bread. The total came out to just over $51.
I got to Angelo’s about 20 minutes after ordering. I headed towards the counter in the back of the shop. The lady at the register told me the pizzas were just about to come out so it was going to be a few more minutes.
The dining room is quite large and is kind of a throwback to when pizzerias did more dine-in business. There are a few molded booths along the wall but most of the seating is pretty old restaurant supply table and chairs. The decor is simple with neutral colors and simple paintings on the wall. The space is lit by a combination of natural light from the large windows in front and fluorescent lights built in to the drop ceiling overhead.
About five minutes after I sat down, I was handed three boxes. I grabbed them and headed home.
I popped open the box for the Wacky Bread w/Cheese first. It’s a pretty classic garlic cheese bread with a thick, golden brown layer of mozzarella cheese on top of the pizza dough bread base. L said she wasn’t really hungry but saw one of these and picked one up right away. They were delicious. It comes with pizza sauce to dip it in but no one really used it.
We also got the dill dip to dip these in. I’m not a big fan of dill dip but J was mad at me because I didn’t get any ranch so she used this instead. It’s essentially ranch anyway but with a few less ingredients.
I grabbed a couple slices of pepperoni and went to sit down. The pizza has a really thick layer of golden brown cheese covering up large, greasy slices of pepperoni. I was honestly surprised at how good this pizza is.
The crust is kind of somewhere between a thick carry out crust and a cracker thin crust but it’s solid enough to hold up to the heavy, sweet sauce and the congealed mass of cheese that sits on top of it. Each slice had a pop of flavor from the sauce that I wasn’t expecting. This seemed like a typical carry-out pizza to me but I was way more on board with the flavor than I assumed I would be.
The cheese pizza was essentially the same but without the grease from the pepperoni. I get annoyed ordering cheese pizza a lot of times because only a couple slices end up getting eaten. When I go back to eat it for breakfast the next morning, I’m always disappointed in the lack of flavor. That wasn’t the case with this pizza. A lot of the flavor came from the sauce so even the cheese pizza was enjoyable cold the next morning.
I liked Angelo’s pizza a lot more than I was expecting to. It’s got a distinct carry-out pizza quality to it but there are some hidden flavor surprises in each bite. I have been craving the grinder for quite a while but I’m happy I went a different direction with our Friday night pizza. It was something different. It might not make the rotation for us just because of the location but it’s still a really tasty pizza.
SW Michigan Dining 