A suburb of Philadelphia, Havertown has quite a few restaurants, including a fair number of pizza places. Some are in strip shopping centers, while others are conveniently located near teen hangouts such as Haverford Township’s indoor skating rink, the Skatium. This review is of Bravo Pizza, a small pizza chain with fifteen locations. This review is of the Bravo Pizza located in the Manoa Shopping Center on West Chester Pike, in Havertown.
Typical of most pizza parlors, Bravo offers weekday specials, such as two large hand-tossed 16-inch pizza pies for about $16. Toppings such as pepperoni can be added for a mere $2 per pie.
On a recent visit, after first perusing about twenty different pizzas, strombolis, calzones and salads that were on neatly displayed, ready to be selected by customers, I ordered a soda and cheese steak sandwich for dining in, along with the two-pie special to go.
I placed my order, paid and was told it would be about fifteen minutes. I waited a moment, expecting the cashier to fill the soda cup at the fountain, but he turned away to handle another task. When he turned back to me, he was surprised that I was still standing there. I had to remind him that I had ordered and paid for a soda, and only then did he provide it to me. I randomly picked an empty booth and headed towards it, and then noticed the table had a large slick of grease or oil. I found another booth to sit at which was clean.
I nursed the soda, not wanting to fill up on soda and not wanting to have to buy a refill. After waiting at my booth for nearly twenty minutes, I turned to watch the cashier and the cook, wondering why a simple cheese steak sandwich was taking so long to make. I had expected the cheese steak to be ready before the pizzas. After a moment, the cashier noticed that I was watching, and it was only then that he called me over. My food had been ready, but he had not called me over to take it, nor had he offered to bring it to me. When he handed me the cheese steak sandwich in a bag, I asked if I could have a plate, since I had ordered the sandwich to eat there. The cashier did apologize, saying he had not realized I wanted to eat it there, and readily provided a plate. The cheese steak was filling. The roll seemed fresh, but in terms of taste, the sandwich was perhaps just slightly better than average.
I tried a slice of the pepperoni pizza a few hours later. The pizza was much better than I had expected it would be, and I found myself regretting that I had even bothered to try the cheese steak. The thin crust pizza dough was just thick enough to support the weight of the sauce, cheese and pepperoni, but not overly thick. The pizza had just the right proportion of sauce and cheese. The pepperoni was not overly spicy and was appropriately placed randomly on top of the pizza so that every pizza slice had several slices of pepperoni. Based on the pizza I took home, I will be back to Bravo pizza again, but I hope that the cashier will be more on the ball.
