Jenny’s Pizza Perfect
332 S. Ford BoulevardI’m exhausted.
Fall’s are always pretty rough for me. It’s a good kind of rough though. I pick up a lot of extra work and make a lot of extra money to make up for all that cash we spent traveling all summer for figure skating. It’s like a refilling of the coffers.
I’ve been pretty lucky this year to work almost every weekend. Those side hustle jobs pay really well and while they’re long, exhausting days, they’re worth it in the end.
This past weekend I was in Ypsilanti for the day. I got to my job site around 8 AM near Rynearson Stadium and was done around 6 PM. I hadn’t eaten much because the job didn’t bring in lunch. I had grabbed some snacks and breakfast from Sheetz on my way to the job site earlier that morning.
Pizza is almost always my go-to when it comes to grabbing something quick in a small town. I searched long and hard to find someplace in Ypsilanti that had been there for a while and had good reviews. It took me longer than I expected in a college town but I eventually found what I was looking for.
Jenny’s Pizza Perfect is on Ford Boulevard north of Parkwood Avenue. It’s in a building that kind of acts like a shopping center connected to a Sunoco gas station. I was looking for a local place that had been around for a while and this one has. The sign probably boasts that they’ve been in Ypsilanti for over 30 years.
I put my order in online as I was sitting at my job site. I was really surprised to see they had a special on a large cheese pizza for $6 if you picked it up. I was planning on picking it up anyway so I got a large pepperoni and sausage pizza which made it closer to $10 and since I wasn’t spending a lot on pizza, I also added on an order of Three Cheese Bread. The total was right around $18 which is less than you can get just a pizza at most places.
I got to the shop about the time my pizza was supposed to be ready. It’s a pretty small, carry-out pizzeria. The public space isn’t much more than a lobby with a window in to the kitchen. There is a rail along one wall with some bar stools but those were all put up so you couldn’t use them. There was a woman working the cash register when I walked in. I gave her my name and she grabbed two boxes from the shelf behind her. She said they had just come out of the oven as she handed them to me.
Eating pizza in the car is a little tough so I always question exactly why I tend to order pizza. This time, I at least had the Three Cheese Bread to eat while I waited for the pizza to cool a little bit.
This Three Cheese Bread was amazingly good. It’s a pretty simple pizza crust topped with a lot of garlic butter and a blend of three cheeses. Nothing surprising but there was such a rich, strong garlicky taste in each bite. I had ordered a cup of garlic butter to dip this in but it didn’t need it. It was super garlicky on it’s own. My plan, as it usually is, was to just eat a few of these and save the rest for later. It was a challenge to stop eating. I would have been happy if this was the only thing I ordered and made this my dinner. It was sooooooo good.
Turns out, the pizza was just as good.
The pizza I ordered was a large thin crust with pepperoni and sausage. It was a really good thin crust that was crispy around the edges but still had some play towards the middle. It was cut in to kind of thin squares so it wasn’t really the kind of pizza you could fold over like a New York slice but it had the same kind of crust as you would find in a New York pizzeria.
This is the kind of pizza that is craveable to me. It’s a thin crust with a really rich sauce, a lot of cheese, plenty of meat so there’s some in each bite and it’s finished off with garlic butter on the crust. Once it cooled down and solidified a bit, I was able to eat a few slices on the way home but I did the most damage once I got back to Kalamazoo. I ate about half of it and did my best to save a few slices for breakfast Sunday morning.
I really liked this pizza. I don’t know why it took me so long to find in my Google search but if I lived in Ypsilanti, Jenny’s Pizza Perfect would absolutely be my go-to Friday night pizza. This is pretty much everything I like in a carry-out pizza. I try really hard to find the longtime pizza shops when I travel because there’s a reason they’ve been there for a long time. I know brick oven and coal fired pizzerias are the new thing but I’ll take a pizza like this over them anyday.
