Pizza Mania is located in a shopping plaza with several
large stores, as well as quite a few restaurants. They have a large menu with
selections from pizza, calzones, pasta dishes, desserts and appetizers. For the
most part, the prices seem reasonable and you get your money’s worth of food.
On the inside, it is decorated how you would expect a little Italian place to
be.
After seating ourselves (which, frankly, I’m not too keen
on, but it seems to be common with every little Italian pizza place I’ve ever
been to in Tampa), the waitress came over and gave us menus and took our drink
orders (water and soda). The drinks come in to-go cups, which is nice that you don’t
have to ask for one later and wait around for the waitress to bring it to you.
For an appetizer, Chris decided to get mozzarella sticks.
They come with a side of marinara sauce to dip them in. Decent sized appetizer,
and fairly inexpensive as well. All in all, not too bad, but the marinara was a
little sweet for me.
For our entrees, I ordered a personal sized cheese pizza
(10”) and Chris got a large calzone with pepperoni. They have 2 options for
calzones: regular and large. Supposedly, the regular is for one person and the
large is for 2-3 people. He got the large so he could take some home too.
Before ordering, he asked the waitress the difference and she held her hands
about 6” apart for the regular and about 12” apart for the large. We didn’t
know just how large the “large” calzone would be (Chris is holding his arm next to it in the third picture to show the size of it). My pizza came out first, and
then she had to go back for his calzone. This was quite possibly the biggest
calzone I’ve ever seen in my life! It came out on the same thing a large pizza
would have. And it came with a boat of marinara sauce. He enjoyed the calzone
and said it was good, but could have used more pepperoni with its huge size.
The cheese in the calzones is both mozzarella and ricotta, which makes it
richer and more filling. My pizza was also good, but I didn’t really like the
crust; it was too hard for me.
Before we got the check, we got a cannoli and a piece of
tiramisu to go. Later on at home, we ate the desserts. I think cannoli are one
of my favorite Italian desserts. This one had a crunchy shell and a sweet
filling with mini chocolate chips in it. The cannoli was tasty and I would eat
another; but the tiramisu was gloppy. The lady fingers were over soaked with
espresso and it just made everything too wet.
Final price for dinner was about $43.00, with tip. Not
terrible I guess. Would I go back? Maybe. I would probably try something else
if I did, maybe a pasta dish or a salad. It was good, but nothing that I haven’t
had before. Its not that the food was bad, because for the most part it was delicious, but it didn't knock my socks off.
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