Savastano's

It’s as far south as we’re going to go as we tour around Tulsa in search of the most delectable specialty pizza the town has to offer.  Savastano’s was, at least by my definition, on the southern fringe of south Tulsa (though who really knows? People define south Tulsa, mid-town, downtown, BA, etc so differently it’s hard to really know).

I’d like to walk you through my entire first experience at Savastano’s under the assumption that it was generally the same for all of us who sampled its flavor just last night.

I drove over to Savastano’s with another member of the crew (Parsy-pants) and really had a wonderful conversation on the way over.  I believe it did quite a lot to start the night off on the right two feet.  Also worth mentioning is that Luke looked really good last night. He was wearing these specs with his work clothes and I think we all couldn’t help but notice how lovely and grown up he looked.  I know I was having trouble guarding my heart.

We got out of the car and headed towards the restaurant where (bless my soul!!) Russ and AA Arnold were chillin waiting for everyone else to show up.  Russ was wearing shorts so it was pretty nice.

To jump forward a bit, once everyone showed up, there were 10 of us if you count the 45 minute late arrival of future CEO of the world Dustin Curzon (which I do count).  It was a nice size group though I must say there were some people missing and you could definitely feel the holes around the table where their presence should have been (you guys know who you are).

We took a little time to decide on what we wanted to order but when we finally made the decision, we went with two large deep-dish pizzas: one with pepperoni and Italian sausage and one with spinach, garlic butter, and chicken.  We had noticed the note in the menu informing us that there would be a 45 minute wait for the deep dish pizzas so we also ordered a couple appetizers and a few of us started in on the beers.

Because I am the one writing this, I guess I get to make my own personal opinion the opinion of the group in a sense.  So I’ll go ahead and say that we all really enjoyed having the food take that long to come out.  I mean sure, some of us had places to be and things to do later, but the long wait BEFORE the food came out really made everyone have to just surrender to the time dinner was going to take. And I really think we all greatly enjoyed getting to laze around at our outdoor table in the wonderful weather and just talk to each other. 

I believe it was due Savastano’s ability to facilitate a nice, long, and relaxing hangout experience that it received an amazing 4.2 out of 5 for atmosphere!!  That is our highest yet by a large margin and it strengthens the argument that creating a place that is comfortable, low-stress, and facilitates friendships is a more important aspect of atmosphere than having really old paraphernalia on all the walls and dimming the lights.

Skip forward a little bit to when the pizza came out.   AAAAAAAAHHHH!!! It’s very exciting.  The pizza looked absolutely amazing and you could tell, just by looking at it, that it had at least 6 heart attacks worth of cheese on each slice.  It’s a little hard to fairly compare Savastano’s pizza to the other restaurants we’ve visited.  It’s a completely different food in a lot of ways.  However, in the end, you’re still taking bread, putting some sauce on it, covering that with cheese, and adding the requested toppings.  So maybe it’s not has hard as we thought to compare the two.

I won’t get into my personal opinion about the pizza other than to say that I’ve eaten the leftovers for both lunch and dinner today and really all I want right now is more.  But we’ll let the numbers do that talking as we reveal that Savastano’s received an astounding 8.5 for pizza!!!  OH. MY. GOSH.  That’s a good score. 

I really can’t speak for the whole group as to why we seemed to unanimously agree that this pizza was theSHIZ.com, but I will say that I really appreciate the large amount of cheese.  Sometimes Chicago-style pizza has too much sauce in the sauce to cheese ratio, but Sav’s really stepped it up on the cheese end of the bargain and the results were very pleasing to the millions of bumps on my tongue that God gave me for tasting things.

At the same time though, I’ve heard people in the group say that they’re not that into the whole “mountains of cheese” thing so who knows what those people tasted in the pizza that caused them to also give it such a good rating.  The point is though that we seemed to like this place quite a fresh bit.

And the last rating that we come to is the blemish on the overall score for Savastano’s.  Sav’s was only able to pull a 2.7 on the value scale.  That’s our lowest value so far.  A large part of this is probably attributable to the fact that we had a $139 ticket for only 10 of us.  However, once you take out the beers, other drinks, and superfluous appetizers, the pizza really comes out to about $2.75 a slice which is actually very comparable to the previous places we have been.  Considering how highly we rated the pizza itself, you would have thought our value would have been higher.

Who can say why the numbers do what they do though?  The one thing we know is that the numbers NEVER lie.  When you are trying to give a review on a restaurant and you stick to only words and qualitative ratings, you’ll never truly know how good it was.  But when you assign a number to it, you might as well be etching it into stone tablets. 

I do think that part of the reason the value was low was due to the fact that we didn’t eat all the pizza and thus, we ended up having to pay for slices we didn’t eat. (though this ended up working out well for me personally because, as I told you earlier, I have greatly enjoyed some leftovers.)

At this point though, I have typed for far too long and most of you are absolutely sick of reading my words (that is if you’ve even gotten this far).  So I will stop even though honestly, I could probably go on at least twice this long about this wonderful little South Tulsa gem.  I was a huge fan and definitely plan on going back. (and I didn’t even get to mention how wonderful it was when Luke, Wylie and myself played some epic shuffleboard inside after dinner!!  Story for another time…)

SAVASTANO’S!!!!

Part of the crew having some intense discussion while waiting for our fabulous pizza to arrive.

Russ is the new Luke...lookin good Russ.

Dustin is ready to smoke his Mozzarella stick.

Cuties.

Seriously, the boys don't know how to be normal. This concerns me.

The glorious pizza.

Yummy cheesy goodness.