Vin Trofeo’s Pizzeria & Pub
120 S. University AvenueI haven’t spent a lot of time in Mt. Pleasant this fall. Sure, I’ve made random trips up there over the years but this fall, I’ve picked up a lot of work outside of my regular job on weekends.
I was back in Mt. Pleasant last Saturday and it won’t be my last trip up there before the end of the month.
I worked most of the day near Kelly/Shorts Stadium on the campus of Central Michigan University. The company I worked for always brings in lunch and if we in a city with a Cottage Inn, it’s always Cottage Inn.
So yes, I had pizza for lunch but when I got done with the job around 7:00, I was hungry. And when I travel, my brain always defaults to pizza.
I found another pizza place in Mt. Pleasant that I haven’t been to yet.
Vin Trofeo’s Pizzeria & Pub is in downtown Mt. Pleasant on University Avenue near Michigan Street. The restaurant opened up in late 2019 in The Basin Building which is the old Mt. Pleasant City Hall. The space on the end that is now Vin Trofeo’s was previously One Twenty South Craft Cocktail Lounge. Because the building is downtown, all of the parking is street parking. Even on a Saturday night after a football game, I was able to find a spot somewhat close to the restaurant.
I may have found parking but the restaurant itself was packed. I was glad I wasn’t eating in. There wasn’t a wait but there were also no tables available.
I didn’t really know what to do because there is no host stand. There is a sign as you walk in that just says find a staff member and they’ll seat you. The restaurant is kind of narrow with booths on one side and the bar on the other. There is a little bit of room back near the front entrance with a few larger tables. The decor is pretty dark with dark grey tiles on the floor, dark walls, and light provided by single bulb fixtures over the bar and tables plus can lights run the length of the walkway between the booths and the bar.
I assumed I’d just go to the bar to get my pizza so I headed towards the server station at the end and waited for a bartender to ask me what I was there for. They both ignored me for a while before someone came out of the kitchen and asked if I had a to-go order. I said I did and he went and grabbed it from underneath a warming lap on a table near the bar. Not sure if this was just a pick up your own pizza like your at Jimmy John’s or what but I did eventually get it and got back on the road towards Kalamazoo.
I had ordered a 16″ thin crust pepperoni and sausage pizza and an order of breadsticks. The cost was a little over $36 with all the taxes and service fees.
When I got back to the car, I popped open the box to the breadsticks first as they’d be the easiest to eat while driving.
The breadstick, made from scratch, are brushed with brushed with garlic butter and topped with Parmesan cheese. They were delicious. They had a kind of crispy exterior to hold on to that garlic butter but were light and airy in the middle. There were a couple of cups of marinara to dip them in but I really liked the garlicky taste and didn’t want that to get overshadowed by the sauce. I ate about half of them on the way home and saved some for my family who I assumed would like them the next morning.
I chose the thin crust 16″ pizza and that was the way to go. The pizza was a delicious thin and crispy. The dough is all made in house and to my surprise, without sugar. That’s almost unheard of in pizza doughs. It obviously changes the taste but in this case, it wasn’t really noticeable because everything on top of that dough is amazingly tasty. The sauce is also made in house and you can tell.
The pizza is loaded u with very crispy pepperoni’s and chunks of Italian sausage. I let this pizza have some time to cool before I tried to pick it up and eat it on my drive back and that worked out really well. I was able to eat the pizza while it was still warm but it had cooled enough that it would stay together.
This pizza was super tasty. I had kind of overlooked this place in the past because of the price but now I see what it costs as much as it does. This isn’t frozen dough and packaged sauce thrown together. There’s a lot going on here and it’s all made in house. There’s a quote from one of the owner’s in this article from 2020 that sums it up. “We never claimed to have the cheapest pizza in town because we don’t want to be cheap pizza.” And that makes total sense. The pizza is a little pricier than some of the cheap places catering to the college crowd but it’s also a helluva lot better.
