After too long of a hiatus, we finally made it out for our second stop on the now re-named Pizza Quest
2014 (that was poor planning naming it PQ 2013 when we only had two months left in the year) We had two guest questers with us this time, Trish's brand new fiance Matt who was visiting from Chicago and Robin's brand new boyfriend Tom. Since Matt was in town we decided to dine on a Friday night instead of our usual Sunday and chose Cucina Asselina. Prior to our meal and at the request of some of the other questers, I sent out a list of Ground Rules (which apparently no one read). The rules mainly came out of the cluster at the end of the last meal regarding our bill, as well as some contention about what type of pizza we should order. We decided on the following Ground Rules:
- We will ask the wait staff to split the food evenly and give us each separate checks (that way we can each pay for our own drinks and won't have a cluster with splitting the check like we did at the inaugural quest)
- We will order at least one margherita pizza at each establishment so that we can compare apples to apples
- We will order the pie that the restaurant is known for as long as it is sounds appealing to most
- We will then order whatever other food we want to try
The restaurant was located in Midtown and definitely had the vibe of a cool, midtown spot. There were four pizzas on the menu and two specials. Apparently, one of the specials (prosciutto, black truffle and farmers egg) was at first off the menu, then on the menu and now its back off as solely as a special. They also had a prosciutto on the menu and the whole time we were there we thought the menu prosciutto was the pizza Cucina Asellina was known for, but turns out it was the special. This makes sense because that special was definitely my favorite pizza by far. We ordered one of each of the pies and tasted the following: Margherita, sausage, proscuitto, and wild mushroom, along with the farmers eggs proscuitto special and a carmellized pear, onion and blue cheese pizza. The pizza's came out on rectangular boards with the pizza in oblong shapes matching the boards.
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| Mushroom pizza (pic stolen from the internet as I forgot to take pics this time) |
Overall, this establishment seemed to be much better received than the last one. The ratings out of a possible 60 points were 48, 37, 46, 44, 38, 46, 48, 33 and 41. Our rookie questers both gave the lowest and highest scores (Tom even gave out two 10's (crust and toppings) which is a first for this crew). We later learned that Matt had actually only tried the sausage pizza (which was the pizza I liked least) which could have explained his low score of 33. Since its Olympic season, we decided to throw out the highest and lowest scores. With those scores out, the average score was 43. The final approval rating: 71% (12% higher than last time)
