Charlie's Pizza

yummy pizza

Moving to a new area can be taxing for a number of reasons, but for me, chief among them is doing the legwork to find the best utility take-out restaurants. You have to have a good Chinese restaurant to rely on, and you have to have a pizza place.

Charlie’s wasn’t my first choice when I was taking those first tentative steps in Toms River; frankly, it was the name. I want my pizza made by Carlo or Pietro, preferably in a setting bearing his last name, or touting the number of brothers involved in the enterprise. When I think pizza, I don’t think Charlie. In fact, in order for me to associate a name less with pizza, it would have to be something like Seamus O’Leary or Tamazaki Hiro. Therefore, it was the last place I tried, and as they say, it’s always in the last place you look.

Charlie’s makes a good, solid, plain pie, one where neither the sauce or the cheese overwhelm the other. They also have an excellent assortment of specialty pies, as well as the usual selection of toppings.

It’s not really the pizza that I like so much about Charlie’s, though, but everything else. They have great subs, cold or hot, on wide, fresh bread (good bread is the keystone of any sub). One caveat, though: if you like mayonaisse on your sub, make sure to ask for extra… to look at their standard, restrained application of it, you’d think it was made out of truffles and platinum. They also have a nice selection of standard entrees, almost all of which I have tried and liked (steer clear of the Chicken Marsala, though – the sauce is watery and relatively flavorless when compared to even a mediocre marsala dish). The calzones are excellent, though the one time I tried their stromboli, the dough in the middle was, shall we say, rare. I really enjoy the fried ravioli served with the house marinara on the side, accompanying the Eggplant Rollatini. They also do a decent cheesesteak, though far from the best I’ve eaten; unfortunately, I have yet to identify a great cheesesteak in this area after ten years of searching.

To me, it isn’t that the food at Charlie’s is outstanding, because it isn’t, but that it is always good, that almost everything on the menu is good, and it is always the same. You know with absolute certainty, every time you order, that you are going to get exactly the same thing you liked the last time you ordered it, and there is value in that. Especially for someone like myself who ends up ordering out four nights out of seven.

So give them a shot – I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.