Restaurant Review: Chicago Pizza Kitchen

2338 MAJOR MACKENZIE DRIVE,
MAPLE ON.
Chicago Pizza Kitchen Unit #1
Just West of Keele street.

Phone: (905) 303 - 4030
http://www.chicagopizzakitchen.ca/

This has been my first review in quite some time.  Not that I've stopped eating out, but just nothing really exciting to review.  I've been a big fan of Chicago deep dish pizza after learning about this type of pizza from the travel channel, and trying to locate an establishment in Toronto that serves this type of pizza.  The first time I've tried it was at UNO in New York and it wasn't as good as it looked on television, then I've heard about this place from Redflagdeal's food forum.  This is my second time going to this place, but the first time really didn't count since they are not opened on mondays.  Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera with me today and had no pictures, but I still decided to give it a review, while its fresh in my head.

This place is really on the outskirts of the GTA and just very close to Canada's wonderland.  The location is pretty good, and looks like lots of regular customers that would goto this place and get delivery.  This place is family friendly, and the staff is very nice when I went on a sunday evening.  They have a very small seating area, about 20 people inside and maybe another 15 on the patio.  Once I stepped in I already knew I wasn't going to be as hungry as I thought I would be because there was no air conditioning on the inside and it was quite windy outside.

The menu is quite good and there is lots of selection and everything is laid out pretty good and easy to navigate and making decisions seem very easy.  I went there for their deep dish pizza so I ordered the Classic which had, sausage, mushroom, green peppers and onions.  All their deep dish pizza are cut into 8 slices, and will take 30 mins to be ready.  In the mean time, we ordered some potatoes wedges with cheese and mayo.  They were fried to a crisp, with lots of cheese and mayo on top, but there wasn't anything special about this dish.  Its missing the pop, or that extra something to make it better, it tasted very plain to the point just like eating potatoes.  I didn't want to fill myself up with that and there was a quarter of the plate left of the wedges.

I had quite an expectation from this place, although I haven't had a deep dish pizza from Chicago, but was thinking it would be as good as New York's UNO.  If your looking for photos, all the pizza's I've seen them serve are actually the same looking as the one on the website.  When it was brought to our table, the waitress served us a slice and noticed that the sauce wasn't very thick, and just fell off the pizza, but there was still lots on it.  There was mini tomato chunks and parsley on top, very home made and watery looking.  When I cut it with my knife I was expecting the cheese to ooze out of the pizza, unfortunately it didn't do that, and I was very disappointed.  Then when cutting down to the bottom, I was expecting a crispy crust and again I was disappointed.  At this point, I didn't even put the pizza into my mouth.  When it went in, it wasn't as good as I would of liked.  I liked the UNO's deep dish from New York much better, and even Papa Johns much better.  After eating 2 slices, it didn't stimulate my taste buds enough, and my appetite was diminishing from the heat and humidity.  I don't like wasting food as I took the rest home.

I've had the chance to use their restroom this time.  I would like to say that its not the cleanist, but it doesn't smell, and all the toiletry was filled up.  For a very small place I would say that is pretty good.  As I left they were very friendly the owner and waitress looked happy and greeted us good bye.  My overall impression of the food wasn't the greatest and I don't think I will go back.  I was originally going to eat there yesterday but was glad I didn't since I was bring a couple of my friends with me.

I would give this place 1/5

Y

Ipod Touch Review

I've been holding out on purchasing any Apple product for quite sometime, but I finally had a use for it.  I don't really listen to music unless I'm in my car and majority of the time, my drives last less than 5 mins and the radio will suffice for that.  Once Apple took off with their Ipods I knew there must be some good in their products, well I finally experienced it first hand.

Cosmetically
I want to say this device is very thin, and fits very well in my hand.  The screen is very well built and has very good manufacturing to it.  The back is silver and you can scratch it very easily.  Also the whole thing is a finger magnet, but you can't really get away from it since its a touch screen.  If you don't like stuff scratched up, I recommend you buy a case and screen protector right away.

Itunes
Everything needs to be synced with itunes for any type of media to go onto your device.  This is where they have total control of your device.  I cannot just drag a new song I just downloaded into my device.  I am not really a big fan of itunes and find it annoying having to sync everything.  My album art didn't come out properly and was a big disappointment.  I can really live without it, and prefer just drag and drop method.  I haven't done too much due to the ease of use right out of the box.  I'm sure if I played around it for long enough I can figure everything out.  One thing I noticed or haven't figured out is, if all my music is in a folder, and I add songs to that folder, Itunes does not automatically add those files to my library, kinda annoying.

Apps
I think this is what makes this device so awesome.  The number of things made for this device.  I think most apps are just shortcuts really to things we can find on the web.  Also so many websites are built for the ipod screen resolution which is great when your surfing.  There is no other smartphone out there that has this many apps.  The only down side is that I cannot have many apps open or running that is not a native, which is kinda annoying like if you have ebuddy running, it closes everytime you switch to another app.

Web surfing
One of the reasons which made me want to pick up this device was the ability to surf the web.  It is very easy to navigate through the web, there are many websites built for this which makes surfing so great.  The scroll and the screen is very responsive.  Some websites takes a bit longer to load due to the complexity of the sites now a day, which is cause by the slow cpu on this device.  The worst thing is not being able to see flash content.  Haven't ran much into that because the website creators have developed pages optimized for the ipod, but it does get kind of annoying not being able to see what I'm use to on my desktop browser.

Wifi
It is pretty easy to get connected, but the connection manager is really not that great.  It doesn't hold the signal very well, it will jump from full bars to one bar right away.  It also doesn't have a good manager to see all the saved wifi hotspots you've been to.

Typing
Coming from a blackberry keyboard, surprisingly it wasn't that hard to get use to.  Without calibrating the screen, I got the hang of it very quickly, but sometimes the suggested word is so small and hard to hit the button.

Music and Video
I have to say, its been pretty easy and straight forward, the sound quality is pretty good and the headphones isn't as bad and cheap as they look.  I guess after years and generations of ipods, they should of perfected the skill and interface design that everyone wants.

Final Words
Well, I am happy with my purchase except that the fact that my headphones didn't come with the mic and I needed to upgrade to the 32GB version to get.  It has crashed on me a few times and froze, so its not as perfect and crash free as apple claim their products are.  Task manager is actually a good thing to have so I can stop a specific thing, but I guess if there isn't multi tasking, there is no need for that.  Good job apple, I do applaud the marketing team and the amount of content you guys are able to get for your product, without it, it wouldn't be so useful.

Thanks

Y