07/02/20
Pizza review time. Not a thin crust guy at all, but Alino’s just made a one time exception for me. Been hearing about this place and all the right reviews and recommendations so being the open book that I am I gave it a whirl. This was a solid pie, cannot lie. Sliver thin pizza with good amount of flop and the dough is freshly prepped and rolled every morning at 9:00 AM before doors open at 11:00 AM. Even though it was a super thin crust it had a poofy-ness towards the ends that enables you to finish off the whole slice. Very soft, plush, and pleasant. If this was a thin and hard/crunchy pizza, it’d be like chewing on crunchy bacon and I’d have hated it. The fresh buffalo mozzarella attached so well to the dough and combined with the special San Marzano tomato sauce, basil, and garlic it was all so simple yet impactful on flavor. The part that really fascinated me was how rapidly my pizza was prepped. I ordered, went to the washroom to rinse my hands, grabbed my table number indicator, and immediately upon sitting down, a server was coming in hot with my 16” margherita on a silver baking tray. Initial thoughts were - did they have this ready before I came in and placed an order or did someone order and then cancel and I happened to order the same pizza? No. Here’s how it goes down at Alino. As a customer walks in, there are a fleet of pizza chefs in the back locked in and ready. They eye who enters the front doors (similar to some sushi places when the chefs greet customers upon entering/leaving) and immediately start rolling out the dough before the customer places their order, a 10 second process. Then once the orders in, before the customer even pays, the information gets sent back to the chefs who assemble the toppings. The topping process normally takes 30 seconds. At this moment, the customer is checking out and the pizza is loaded into the wood fired ovens at 900 degrees and left to poof for 90 seconds. So 10-30-90 which totals to 2 minutes and 10 seconds is all it takes for this masterpiece. Alino’s is the Jimmy Johns of the pizza landscape. Now when it gets super busy, they said customer wait times may get backed up to 5 minutes. Which is still mind blowing to me. Located in an industrial looking brick building, with tons of seating inside and outside, the inside posses an open cafeteria feel. They have a dessert section up front with carrot cake, red velvet, cannolis, and in-house made Italian gelato. I got the tiramisu gelato which was banging. Overall pizza score: 8.1/10.