Mr. FvF and I were lucky enough to be invited to the pre-opening friends & family event at the new Dewey's Pizza at Austin Landing. For you suburbanites that tend not to venture too close to downtown Dayton - I can sum Dewey's up pretty easily by just telling you it's killer pizza. Perfectly chewy crust from a Hades-hot brick oven, high quality (and several locally sourced) toppings, a few calzones and a handful of good salads. They keep the focus where it should be - on the pies. With some quirky names (like the Dr. Dre) and nicely profiled flavor combination, even the pickiest eaters would be hard pressed not to find something they love. While Dewey's pies appeal to people like me who would order something way of the pizza map like their seasonal Porky Fig (fig jam sauce, prosciutto and gorgonzola) - you can also pacify the less adventurous 'za eaters with the X-Pepperoni or just build your own.

I can get pretty wonky when it comes to pizza toppings, but the mister likes to keep it basic. Their special was The Don - all of the good Italian meats and plenty of cheese. We did that one half, and on the other half, the Meatball (pretty self-explanatory).



One of the things I love is that they're not dicks about doing half & half pies, as long as the sauce base is the same. So, if you have wildly different taste than your dining partner, no sweat. Both sides tasted amazing, but I stopped just short of hating myself...or so I thought. Did you guys even know Dewey's had dessert? I'm betting a lot of people don't, because who can suffer dessert after eating their pizza?

• Can't recall the name of the maker, but Dewey's sausage is made by a Cincy-area purveyor and can only be found on their pies.
• While the dough is fresh, it's aged 2-3 days, which gives it the chewiness that their customers love.
• Their current stores are in the major Ohio markets, and St. Louis. Never would have guessed, but apparently Dewey has family there.
• Dewey is a real guy! 
• In all of their markets, beers are also locally sourced and some are exclusive to their restaurants.
• An eatery after my own heart - they love wine so much, they made their own. I didn't get to try this because I was busy sampling beers and turning into Violet Beauregarde, but it's on my to-do list. 
• There's a good chance they're working on a gluten-free pizza dough. According to the head honchos, they won't put anything on their menu that they don't love themselves, so I'm guessing it will be more than passable.
• Those dudes in the kitchen can spin some serious dough. 

I'll start off by saying that I added and removed the tag "Irish pub" from this post at least six times before just leaving it there. No matter how drunk I was when I got there, this place was no more Irish than my Uncle Mario. The most Irish thing about Michael O'Toole's is the name itself, which is a complete misnomer. I have a feeling that the person who came up with the concept feels that serving pasta and ribs is as authentic to Ireland as clover tattoos on St. Patrick's Day and Celtic tattoos on fat, pasty white folks.  If you're a dirty mick, people just deduce your heritage when you spit on cab drivers or your husband openly mocks your drinking problem.  At least that's what I hear.  At any rate, you don't have to go advertising it, and false advertising is even worse.

That said, they had a good looking beer list, and a decent, yet incoherent menu.  We ordered an appetizer sampler, but nothing was really memorable. My entree, the prosciutto and Gorgonzola stuffed chicken was tasty, but small.  When I read "whole airline chicken breast" I was expecting a fair amount of bird, but what arrived on my plate was somewhere under six ounces.  They left the skin on, which I think is great.  There are several different opinions about this, but in fancier-pants cooking, skin-on is the way to go.  It retains all of the moisture and a fair amount more seasoning than boneless-skinless.  The bird was well-seasoned and you could actually tell what it'd been stuffed with, without having read the menu description. 
I didn't get much scoop on the food that the other gents ordered.  You see, as much as I always detested Seinfeld, there was a lot to George Costanza's theory about worlds colliding.  It's a bit of a push for me to report on dining I did on business trips, but I'm certainly not going to ask my co-workers how their dinner hits their palate.  FvF world must stay completely separated from regular work world, as well as in-law world. 

Service was okay - just okay.  Nothing to write home about, and he wasn't very knowledgeable about their wines or top shelf bar items.  The price points, in my opinion, are a little steep, considering portion sizes.  The part of the menu that almost made me stroke out was the side orders.  Mac & cheese, cole slaw, fries, wild rice, any of them - $5 each.  Yeah, American dollars.   Shut the front door!  Do they have a special decoder ring in them?  Are they gemmed with gold bullion?  Will they be spoon-fed to me by an oiled-up immigrant?  Chewed up by my server and spit back into my mouth like I'm a baby bird?   If the answer to any or all of those questions is no, then I can see that we're quite finished here. 

Plans of rummaging all over the Cap City for the greatest food were marred by the late March snow we got both days I was in Columbus for work.  At least I was prepared for it, though I can't say as much for my Texan co-worker.  The first day of the convention it wasn't too terribly cold, but started snowing just as we left for lunch.  I hadn't brought a hat, so I opted for the closest place open for lunch - Char Bar.  I really wanted to go to Martini, which was equally close - but not open for lunch.  What the hell, Columbus.  Arena District eateries - you could have made a stone-cold fortune during this convention, but hardly any of you were open for lunch.

The menu had a fair amount of choices as far as salads, burgers, sandwiches and wraps, and even some fork & knife options.  One thing I wasn't expecting was the handful of Hungarian menu items, and I made a snap decision to order the Chicken Paprikash.  The food took a little longer than I'd have liked to come out, but it gave us time to get our shop talk out of the way. 

The menu didn't note what my dish came with, aside from Texas toast - so I just hoped and prayed that the little dumplings served with the chicken were gnocchi and not wheat pasta dumplings.  Either way, I was eating them, because the chicken was gnarly.  It had a consistency somewhere between chicken thighs and the overly-processed, mechanically-separated stuff that comprises the "grilled chicken breasts with rib meat" that you find in the freezer section.  The sauce was decent, but not on par with other similar Hungarian sauces I've had.  I'd love to show you a photo, but blogger is STILL being a dick and only the top third of the photo will upload. 

Service was decent enough, but price points were a little out of range for the food you're getting - mostly due in part to the area you're in and your lack of options.  Next year, I'll just eat at one of the 20 places *inside* the Columbus Convention Center.