La Famiglia Restaurant Caldwell NJ
This is a really good small town restaurant that always delivers at a reasonable price and generous portions. They have a lot of classic Italian dishes that are elevated to another level. Their Chicken Giambotta is probably the best I’ve ever tasted. It is sautéed with mushrooms, peppers and onions, and topped with homemade garlic seasoned Italian fries.
As for the pizza, their regular pizza is not all bad. It is often said we eat with our eyes. If this is the case, the Hotsy Totsy Roni Cups pizza might seem like love at first sight. It is a large thin crust pizza bombarded with “roni cups”. Roni cups is pepperoni slightly smaller in diameter, that when cooked at high heat, crisps up and curls up into what looks like little cups. If you get it right out of the oven when it is hot and crispy, this might be a winner. However, if you let it rest, those “cups” fill up with a lot of unwanted grease and oil. In fact, this was so incredibly salty, that it obscured anything that was tasty about this. It is all about balance, and the over abundance of pepperoni was its ultimate demise.
What is more ironic is that it is served with something called Mike’s Hot Honey. As you might imagine, it is spicy honey infused with chilis. I love hot and spicy food, but this was pretty hot. That in combination with the spiciness of the pepperoni, and its a bit much. The sweetness does not cut the heat nor the salt and oily mess, so I am not sure what purpose this serves. Often sweet and savory go together, but not in this case.
The large pizza is cut into 9 slices which leaves that dreaded center slice which is always sloppy, and has no crust, so no matter how crispy it comes out of the oven, it just folds up and slips through you fingers into a mess. If you let this sit for any period of time, that center slice becomes a sponge for all this other grease pouring out of the avalanche of pepperoni. You can see from the photo how the oil saturates this center slice, and cardboard on the bottom of the box (which you normally do not see) is also saturated. Pizza is not always a healthy option, in this case, its extremely salty and its best if you stick with their more traditional pizza options.
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