MAZARA PIZZA
105-03 Metropolitan Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 544-0416

"Pizza by the slice." It's the Mazara tag line, and it implies that they might be alone in selling anything less than a whole pie. They forget that this is NYC, not the 'burbs (much to the chagrin of some denizens who will, in a short time, fade into dusty oblivion) and that pizza is almost always offered by the slice (Dee's and Nick's notwithstanding). Naturally, I had to try a slice of said pizza and moseyed on in one hot afternoon to do just that.

The average Mazara customer is a construction worker, and I waited in line behind about a half dozen of them while the staff tripped over itself in confusion. Pizzas were being handed out that no one ordered, people were bumping into each other, and there was the occasional snarky comment. The soda machine didn't work, forcing everyone to shell out twice as much for a bottle of the same soda. How coincidental.

I ended up ordering a Regular Cheese Slice, a Chicken Tomato Garlic Slice, and a Chicken Roll. Never have I had a more soggy slice of pizza than that plain slice. It drooped like a soggy rag as though it never saw the inside of an oven. Plus, it bled grease like nobody's business. The sad thing is, it actually could have been decent if the cheese wasn't so cheap and the crust had been cooked. The chicken slice was actually not bad, but I wasn't wowed by it. Meanwhile, the chicken roll was just flat out mediocre. The sauce tasted different from the sauce used on the pizza (a mistake in my book), and there was about as much flavor as I'd expect from eating a cardboard box with cheese in it. Sorry about the lack of photos, but my camera battery died once I got inside. Still, pizza on a paper plate looks pretty much the same everywhere.