Return to Jersey Guys Pizza

UPDATE: Ownership of Jersey Guys Pizza changed hands on March 2, 2015, and the restaurant has since been renamed as GoodSons Pizzeria.

I returned to Jersey Guys Pizza since my last visit to whisk away the doldrums over a medium pepperoni and onion pizza. I appreciate what the Guys' hot oven does to the onions, giving them a roasted flavor with some eye-catching char. With pepperoni and a fair share of gooey cheese, it sure helped to put the blues on the back burner.

What do you get when you take a baked pasta dish and swap out the pasta with French fries? You get Jersey Guys' Pizza Fries, an entertaining concept. The dish would have been better if the fries would have spent a little more time in the fryer; the centers were underdone enough to be distracting.

On another visit I tried the sausage with peppers and onion sandwich. Despite the bounty of ingredients, I wasn't impressed with the sandwich. The time spent in a super-hot oven imparting roasted flavors to the vegetables on Jersey Guys' pizzas are completely devoid on this sandwich. The peppers and onions look and taste like they've been sauteed with the lid on until softened. A similar treatment seems to be the case with the link Italian sausage used. All the ingredients used are perfectly competent and plentiful, but the end result was rather bland and uninspiring.

What makes Jersey Guys' pizzas so tasty could easily be employed on this sandwich using a trick I observed at another local pizzeria. Assemble the raw vegetables on a very small pan and run it through the oven just like a pizza pie. I don't think the oven would achieve the same result with cooked link sausage. More direct heat may be needed – from either a skillet or flat-top grill – to achieve optimal browning. The hoagie roll too could enjoy some toasting. Then this sandwich could pass muster alongside Jersey Guys' beefy cheesesteaks and delectable Meatball Parm [see blog post].