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Dining Divas at PW Pizza on Chouteau
The Dining Divas Bet On PW Pizza and Lose; Some Menus Items Good, Most Only So-So
By Lisa Kampeter
Each month, it’s a roll of the dice when it comes to choosing the restaurant for the Dining Divas. And sadly, I’ve been know to come up with snake eyes a time or two.
We went to PW Pizza on Chouteau in St. Louis and in the same building as Vin de Set. Perhaps it’s the building because when the Dining Divas dined at Vin de Set years ago, we wondered then what all the hype was about. And that was the feeling of PW Pizza.
Working downtown, I’m familiar with most of the restaurants in the area. PW Pizza is one restaurant that is on the dining list of many of my fellow employees. But I continue to wonder why.
We were delighted when we first arrived and savored the scent coming from the wood-fire grills. Our eyes glistened when we immediately noticed the peanut butter pie displayed so fabulously at the entrance. And the menu looked appealing, but that was about it.
The entire group had barely all been together for five minutes when our anxious waiter came to take our order. We sent him away a couple more times. We have to take a break from our conversations to order, and for some of us, that’s hard to do. The Back-To-School Diva had to share some stories with us about her return to the classroom as a student after being away for 20 years. Of course, the Teaching Divas assured her she would not flunk out as her extreme fear had yet to subside.
Then there were the stories from the New Adventures of the Dating Diva. She’s back in the swing of things again, and she had many of us laughing over the Stalker Dating Diva she almost became. Actually, she’d given up that title years ago, but we chuckled about her “boyfriend” she’d had for years, only he didn’t know it. Sometimes you’d think we were all teenagers instead of most who are parents with teens.
Once we had time for the waiter, the Sassy Diva pointed out that the restaurant had a selection of over 90 beers, which is great for beer drinkers, but for the Coke drinker, they only had Pepsi. Our waiter was not going to win here. But he didn’t help himself much at all throughout the night.
Several of us ordered a Spinach Salad with warm bacon dressing. All of us got a spinach salad with no dressing. Then we told our waiter that we needed dressing. He brought out vinaigrette. Most of us had already poured the dressing onto our salads before we realized his mistake again.
Maybe we would have like to have a beverage with our salad without dressing. Refills were at a minimum that night. Most times, our glasses were empty (unless, of course, you were enjoying one of the 90 beers choices).
We shared Roasted Red Pepper Hummus with pita bread and enjoyed it. The Food Outreach Winner, the Spinach, Artichokes, and Meatballs Pizza, won favorite recipe this year, but the Dining Divas wouldn’t have given it a prize. No gold medal winner here. It was just average. The blue ribbon winner by this group was definitely the Meaty Calzone. Everybody wanted a chunk of it, and everybody loved it.
And then we were left with dessert. The Carrot Cake with cream-cheese frosting and raisins and nuts was worth the calories. But the Peanut Butter pie…the one that tantalized us in the doorway immediately when we entered the restaurant…it let us down. Just average. Although the Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Diva still managed to finish it off the next day.
In math terms, as the Mathematics Divas may say, average is acceptable. In Dining Divas terms, it’s not worth it. Odds are the next roll of the dice will be better than PW Pizza. And I’ll take those odds.
