Buon Appetito - Chantilly, VA

A colleague recommended that I try this place. They told me that the pasta sauce was great. Well Stella, maybe next time! I, of course, ordered their calzone. This establishment offers three or four varieties and, as a meat lover, I couldn't resist ordering the pepperoni and sausage.

What I learned about the calzone's here are:

1) They are cheap, running only $6.79.

2) They are made like a pizza and folded over with the toppings added to order.

3) They are very standard.

First, I would  classify the size of the calzone as medium-small. Definitely not the smallest I've had so far, but pretty small in comparison to most. This is almost what you would order if you wanted a snack lunch instead of a full lunch with pizza and breadsticks. The dish was served with a small plastic cup of marinara that was pretty good. I would describe it as a high quality spaghetti-o's sauce because it was only the sweeter and on the more "ketchup-y" side.

The dough of this calzone very not very good. It was tough because all of the moisture was baked out of it. Furthermore, the knives they provide to cut their food with are butter knives, which made it slightly frustrating. The taste of the dough was pretty good, and also on the sweet side. They did not doctor the dough up like some places do with cornmeal, cheese, or cuts in the bread. The fillings were your medium-quality pizza-place toppings, italian pizza sausage and a decent pepperoni. One thing I noticed is that they brought the heat way up on this calzone through baking it, and the cheese was molten. The ricotta was mixed well with the toppings but lost its consistency because it was baked too high, which is confirmed by the toughness of the dough that was miraculously unburned.

I can say with full confidence that this establishment makes very good food, and good pizza. If I had to try this place again, I might even get their pasta as recommended by my coworker. Their pizza looked delicious. However, I am forced to rate this calzone as a C because of the negative aspects listed, which were offset by the positives of it's price and the tastiness of it's fillings and marinara.

Pizzamore - Mt. Dora, FL

My mother surprised me with a trip to go get a calzone at a local Mt. Dora hotspot named Pizzamore (that's Pizza + Amore if you didn't already put it together). The surprising thing is that this restaurant is inside of a house. Literally, I felt like I was eating dinner in little johnny's bedroom.

I ordered their calzone and had them add pepperoni into it. The ingredients were pretty good, the pepperoni was a decent quality and the cheese was very thick. They did include ricotta, but no ham - which is why I added the pepperoni. The calzone was sufficiently cooked, the bread was overcooked at the tradeoff that the ingredients were at the proper temperature. One thing that this restaurant seems to do is to liberally pepper the outside of the bread with dry parmesan cheese and bake it into the dough. This gives the bread a crunch which, while not inherently bad, added to the feeling that the dough was overcooked.

The calzone was medium large, and was more on the expensive side, at $12.99 (because of the added pepperoni). The last criticism of this dish is that the marinara was not very good, and was clearly canned and reserved.

I give this calzone a C- for the value, and artistic merit that was taken with it that didn't quite add up.