Abo's Pizza of Centennial

7475-6 E. Arapahoe Rd.
Centennial, CO 80112
303-468-4700
303-468-4703 (fax)
Website

Styles of Pizza: New York-style thin crust
Servce: counter, carry-out, delivery

Standout Tidbits: Alarmingly bad pizza

Review: I was so excited to learn there was an Abo's Pizza near my office. There aren't many places around the office to get decent pizza that wasn't delivery-only. Also, I heard such good things about Abo's. It has received some Best of Boulder awards, there are some good reviews online for other locations, and it is supposedly authentic NY-style pizza. So, fellow founding Zealot, Eric, and I set out to give the place a shot.

Allow me to set the scene...

This Abo's location is set back in a shopping center at the corner of Arapahoe and Quebec. The location is a good size and has plenty of seating. All in all it looks fairly new, clean, and what I think is overly "fancy" for a NY-style, counter-service pizza joint. Instead of a half-full cooler with a couple Coke products and one standard brand of bottled water, there is a cooler full of fancy waters, juices, and teas, as well as another cooler on the counter with pre-packaged, individual Ben & Jerry's ice cream treats. The blackboard menu is ornately hand-painted and in the back are SIX beautiful, gleaming pizza ovens. On all of the tables are custom, artsy-fartsy, welded iron napkin and condiment holders. As I said, it is a little more than I expected. Upon taking all this in, Eric and I were feeling optimistic.

Abo's offers up NY-style pies as big as 18 inches and by the slice. The menu features many specialty pies with NY-themed names like "Manhattan", "Soho", and "The Village", a butter sauce za with chicken, spinach, garlic, tomatoes, and artichoke hearts.

We ordered and soon received our food, 2 slices of pepperoni for Eric and 2 cheese for me. I consider the cheese pie to be the foundation of a pizza joint. If you can't get this right, there is no use adding anything on top. The Abo's slices were good-sized, seemingly well cooked, and served on the fine china of a good NY-style pizza place -- the scalloped-edge, bleached-white, paper plate. Then we took our first bites...

This pizza was horrible. Tasteless. I thought I had accidentally taken a bite out of the plate. I waited a minute to see if maybe the heat of the fresh slice was overwhelming the flavor. I took another bite and decided there wasn't any flavor to be overwhelmed. Next I sampled a little chunk of just cheese on its own, then a dollop of sauce, and finally and bit of bare crust. Besides getting only a hint of tomato from the sauce there was nothing. Bland, seasoning-free, tasteless. Eric felt the same way about his slices with pepperoni. Adding tons of parmesan cheese and red pepper flakes only made the meal taste like spicy cheese from a jar.

I know we should go back a second time to make sure it wasn't a fluke, but I am scared. I sincerely hope not all of the Denver/Boulder area locations are like this, but I went back online afterwards and saw a couple customer reviews of different stores that fell inline with our opinions. I think we will have to at least go check the original Boulder location on the Hill. Wish us luck.

Gavin