Tim’s Wood Oven Pizza is a restaurant located at the Eagle Run shopping center (129th & Maple) in Omaha. Jessica and I went there last night, and since it was someplace we hadn’t tried we thought we would give it a shot.
We started off with a couple of drinks. Jess had a “Cherry Cheesecake Martini” and I had a “Navaltini”. The restaurant uses UV Vodka and is quite proud of it, but perhaps they’re a bit too proud. Not only do they have the branding on multiple things, but the entire drink menu comes from the UV site. Would you like to know what’s in the drinks we had? Just go here: UV Recipes. For the martinis you should expect to pay $4.50 a piece (although it isn’t listed anywhere), which is about average for a martini, but they’re not serving “top shelf” vodka (no offense to UV, but a bottle costs about $9 – $10 compared to Gray Goose at $25 – $30) so that is kind of a steep markup.
Next up we ordered appetizers. There were quite a few things on the menu to choose from, so we decided on the Sampler. For about $10 this came with:
2 pieces of Garlic Cheese bread
4 Mozzerella Sticks
4 Wings (BBQ or Hot)
4 Chicken Strips
The garlic bread was pretty sub-par… it was a very soggy piece of Texas toast, and wasn’t really all that flavorful. Jessica didn’t eat more than a bite (and that’s usually her favorite item). The Mozzerella sticks were your standard-type Mozzerella stick, nothing to write home about (and definately not fresh-made). The same could be said about chicken strips. They were just your basic fried chicken strip… no real stand-out flavor to speak of other than chicken and a basic batter (not breading). Now, Jessica loved the wings… she couldn’t get enough of them. They were crispy and had a great BBQ flavor… very nice. Of course, your mileage may vary… to quote another review:
The waitress wasn’t too friendly and didn’t even really apologize when we sent our wings back because they weren’t cooked. (nothing gets you in the mood to eat more than under cooked chicken!)
We didn’t have this issue (the wings were fully cooked), but it is kind of upsetting to see that something like that made it out of the kitchen. Next we ordered our main dishes. Jessica got her “standard” pizza (pepperoni, green pepper, and pineapple) and I ordered the Portobello Chicken Pasta. There was about a 15 minute wait between ordering and getting our food and with how busy it was that day, that was pretty nice. Of course, that was unfortunately where the “nice” ended and the “sad” began. We’ll start with the pizza.
The pizza cost about $11 and was approx 10-11 inches… not a bad size for two people. Our issues didn’t come from the size, but rather, everything else. For one, they claim that they use “hand-stretched” pizza crust… and I don’t believe it. Here is what a pizza crust that has been hand-made looks like:
Here is what the crust of the pizza we ate looked like (this is just an example… this isn’t their pizza):
See all those holes? That tells me this is a frozen crust… the pizza at Tim’s had these nice, evenly spaced holes all along their crust. Not a good sign. It wouldn’t be a major deal breaker if the crust actually tasted good, but it didn’t. It was very dense, and aside from the taste it gets from the Wood Oven, it was very bland. I can get a hand made pizza from Whole Foods (where they also use a nice wood oven) and it tastes 100 times better than this, and the 16inch, 3 topping pizza I get there costs about the same. Speaking of toppings… we had a total of 6 standard size pepperonis on our pizza… just 6. We counted… maybe they just had a shortage that day. I can tell you they didn’t have a shortage of canned pineapple, because there was more than I could stand on the pizza. I actually resorted to picking them off, but the juice had saturated the cheese to the point where I just couldn’t eat it. The green peppers were nice and fresh and had a nice even amount on there. I can’t complain about the peppers… in fact, they were perfect. The sauce used on the pizza was your standard fare, not really all that sweet or salty, just kind of “there”… same can be said about the cheese, nothing special or different. Thus ends our pizza tale (we ended up only eating about a quarter of the pie each)… on to the pasta!
The pasta I ordered was the Chicken Portobello (ringing in at about $10), which was supposed to be a dish of chicken, pasta, alfredo sauce, portobellos, and artichokes covered with mozzerella. What we got was a bowl of pasta (not quite al dente, more on the soggy side… it would more often than not break when I tried to put it on my fork) covered with what we believe to be canned Portobello Alfredo sauce. Once again, we can’t prove it’s not home made, but our opinion is that it came from a can/jar. There were no large pieces of mushroom, instead it was just little diced soggy mushroom bits… basically what you’d expect from this:
In fact, this is exactly what it tasted like (it says “Restaurant Quality”, maybe they mean it!). The chicken wasn’t layered on top, so it was pretty soggy, and didn’t appear to have been grilled. In taste and appearence it resembled this:
Now, don’t get me wrong… products similar to Bertolli and Tyson have their place, but that place shouldn’t be a restaurant. The rest of the dish was the same… dried parsley on top, standard cheese, and canned artichokes (which was confirmed in another review).
We didn’t get any desert, and our bill came to the astounding $42.01 for two people. I have to give the restaurant a D+, the wait staff wasn’t that bad, and the atmosphere was decent, but the rest was just miserable. Perhaps we’ll try eating there again in the future, but I don’t see it happening any time soon.