Brattleboro Village Pizza in Brattleboro, VT

The Facts:

Pizza: Brattleboro Village Pizza

Business Category: Locally-owned

Website: http://www.villagepizzaexit3.com/

Location: 1155 Putney Rd. in Brattleboro, VT (at I-91, exit 3, 3^rd exit from the traffic circle)

Date of Review Visit: August 3, 2015

What I Ordered: Small (10”) pizza with sausage, pepperoni, and Canadian bacon

Price: $11.83 (includes tax but not drink)

The Micro:

Crust: I was looking for some traditional northern-style pan pizza on my recent trip to New England, and Brattleboro Village Pizza did not disappoint.  The crust is crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside; it is about 1” thick around edge and just thick enough underneath.  My pizza was baked perfectly.  Magnifico!  Score: 10/10.

Sauce: The sauce appears in good quantity, and it has a very sweet taste, even sweeter than Papa Johns.  I have only written that last phrase about one previous pizza. My opinion is that tomato sauce should taste like tomatoes, not a bag of sugar.  Nevertheless, this sauce is pretty good for the style it is.  Score: 9/10.

Cheese: The cheese appears in good quantity, and it produces some but not lots of grease.  The taste gets lost in the sweetness of the sauce, so the cheese has no discernible flavor.  Score: 8/10.

Toppings: The sausage has just the right amount of spiciness.  The pepperoni comes in nice thick slices.  The Canadian bacon is very sweet; it tastes like it is glazed in brown sugar or honey.  All toppings appear in good quantity.  Overall, these toppings really hit the mark.  Score: 10/10.

The Macro:

Appearance/Atmosphere/Service: The pizza’s appearance was excellent.  The lady serving me could enter my order faster than I could place it; that’s impressive and a first for me.  The dining atmosphere is purely functional, making for the only slight deduction on this criterion.  Score: 9/10.

Value: Brattleboro Village Pizza uses an odd pricing structure for their toppings.  For a small pizza, the 1^st topping costs $1.15, while each topping thereafter costs only $0.25.  This pricing encourages you to pile on the toppings.  There’s also Vermont’s confiscatory 10% restaurant tax.  Outsiders don’t call this place the People’s Republic of Vermont for no reason.  Overall, the high price ensures that this pizza is not great value, but it scores better than you might expect due to the excellent quality.  Score: 5/10.

Taste: As you can guess from the comments above, the sweetness of the sauce and the Canadian bacon overpowers everything else.   I prefer sweet to spicy, so this is a pretty good tasting pizza on my palette.  Score: 18/20.

The Final Judgment:

Brattleboro Village Pizza makes very good pizza if you don’t mind the sweetness.  I don’t mind the sweetness, and therefore I give it high marks.  Score: 69/80.