Uno's frozen pizza...

Well i've seen it all. From my childhood eating at Uno and Due in Chicago to the latest chain of Uno's restaurants, now they sell them frozen. After a dinner of broiled Tilapia tonight i walked over to Jewel (grocery store) and saw these pizzas. I bought a cheese and a sausage. Of course i threw one in the oven when i got home. Not bad but not great, and nothing like i ate when i was young. I knew Uno's sold out a long time ago but this really seals the deal.

We went to an Uno's last Sunday and I was underwhewlmed by my wife's pizza. I had the Rattlesnake Chicken that was ok, but VERY greasy.


Dennis in Cary

Home Run Inn makes a decent frozen pizza. Their Take 'n' Bake series is as good as any frozen pizza gets and it's actually very good.
www.homeruninn.com

I keep meaning to walk over to the original Uno or Due (about a mile from my office in downtown Chicago) to see if the quality truly has slipped. It certainly had in June 2003, on my last visit. The pizza was so awful I ended up telling the head waiter, who cheerfully refunded my money with the air of someone used to doing so. I haven't been back since.

To really see if the quality has slipped, I need to go several times over a period of a few weeks, but with a wife and two little kids and a home in the suburbs, I seldom have time. But I promise to try. My parents have been to one or the other recently and said the pizza was as good as ever (and they've been going for close to 40 years). I used to love Uno and Due, and have been going myself for over a quarter of a century. I'll be so disappointed if they've become tourist traps rather than quality pizza joints.

I was on a business trip to Chicago in October and I managed to eat at both Gino's and Uno's. Overall, I think we liked Gino's better (better crust, sauce and sausage), but we still found Uno's to be very good. We actually liked their pepperoni better as it turned out a little crispy compared to Gino's which was buried underneath everthing else. One of the reasons we probably had good luck with Uno's was because we were the first ones in the door on a Sunday morning at about 11:20. They actually do not open until 11:30 but one of the servers saw me try the door so he came and unlocked and said come on in. So ours was the first pizza of the day. It took just over 30 minutes which is pretty quick for them and it was cooked perfectly. One of their problems sometimes I think is that they try to do a high volume and quick turnover with something that takes a long time to cook properly. I would gladly go back to either place next trip.