Bourbon Street Pizza Company — Restaurant in Ontario

Fantastic locally owned family restaurant. On the day I visited none of the customer-facing staff were part of the family, but that tells me that the family knows how to hire good folk.

Very friendly staff, enchanting atmosphere mixing traditional 19th century colonial architecture with modern where needed and a lovely bourbon street touch.

I ordered a pizza by delivery some months ago and am sad to say i was disappointed. I have a high bar of quality for food i eat and I sadly had to throw most of my large double pepperonni extra cheese and sauce away.

I came today because food quality is always best when dining in, and I ordered bread sticks with cheese and bacon to start. I wanted to try the mushroom steak melt but 4 sticks of cheesy goodness is a whole meal on its own.

They come with marinara, of which I ordered double expecting high quality, but i was disappointed again. It worked well enough to put weak marinara flavour on the excellent sticks but I feel this sauce is likely the culprit to my disappointing pizza as well. Sauce is the foundation above dough (also a little disappointing but i don't have a perfect recipe myself for that yet) in order to make the rest great.

I've tasted italian restaurants from Calgary, Vancouver, the UK, and Saskatchewan. I like my marinara. If the owners read this it would be my suggestion that you reduce down your marinara further. I assume it comes from typical giant cans for restaurants but it can be modified after.

My recipe to alter by starting at fresh roma tomatoes is thus:

Cut tomatoes into halfs or quarters, put in a pot, add water, bring to a boil for a few minutes. Whole leaves of basil or otherwise large plant matter spice and herb is welcome but not required.

Put tomatoes through an italian-style press that squeezes every last usable bit from the boiled tomatoes thats possible via a cone shaped mesh into a large bowl. Scrape all tomato flesh from the mesh and into the same bowl.

Pour the bowl into as large a pot as needed and bring to a boil, once boiling reduce to a rolling simmer for as many hours as is needed to get rid of 90-95% of the water. Cast iron with enamel cookware is best. Once simmering is started now you add marinara spice before leaving it. Ex. Marinara spice, small diced fresh garlic, onion, finely chopped basil, oregano, parsley

Once simmered to the desired point, the sauce is ready to use or store immediately.

For this restaurant if using canned marinara i recommend simply simmering the marinara to the 90-95% range. Cast iron adds deliciousness as iron is an essential vitamin and enhances flavour. You can optionally increase the marinara spices with a lesser amount of fresh ingredients. I once had a marinara in Vancouver with zero water in it. Just a red spicy plant mush. Weirdly it was delicious just off-putting.

I would also recommend offering your "spicy marinara" as a dip if you make the regular marinara better. Its 50:50 buffalo and marinara far as i can tell but even watery it pairs very well.

Blerb over...

This place came highly recommended to me, and so my family planned to end our week off with a movie and pizza. Purchased two pizzas - honestly, fantastic. The smell outside the building alone would have kept me coming back for more. In the middle of the night my wife started puking, followed by my three daughters - lastly and inevitably; me. We all experienced classic food poisoning symptoms, all within 8 hours of eating, and with me being away the entire day, the kids at school - it was in fact the only consistent thing we ate. We ordered a Cajun chicken pizza, which only the adults ate, and a pepperoni pizza, to which we all ate. After 30 or so hours of what I can only describe as my family's darkest weekend (also Thanksgiving weekend), I was able to contact the store, as I wanted to make them aware of the issue, out of concern for others. While the young gentlemen supervisor was apologetic, he noted the owner was not there, but that he would take my name and number. I was not accusatory, nor looking for freebies as is likely often the case with someone looking to complain; but needed them to know before contacting the local health authorities, that something incredibly wrong had happened here. Almost two weeks later, I have received no call back, and there has been no concern for my family's well-being, which makes me also question how seriously this business took what I had informed them of. I dont know if its seeing your 9 year old count the amount of times she's puked past the number 30, or what prompts a public review as negative as this, but my guess is it was the disregard for my message, and the owner/company's unwillingness to contact me afterwards that likely prompts this. I dont know if its a local owner, who has succeeded, and therefore is inept at accepting negative responsibility, but to me - given the very graphic details I provided the supervisor, the fact that I myself told him that it may not have been anyone's fault; sometimes cheese/pepperoni can come with foodborne illnesses from the supplier; I was incredibly taken back by not being contacted by this business afterwards. As I expressed to the supervisor, this isnt a reach out for freebies, how could I possibly conceive of eating pizza anytime soon, I had it coming out of my nose, and cleaning it off of walls when my kids couldnt make it to the toilet; but the lack of accountability/empathy, tells me all I need to know about this...

We had never visited Bourbon St Pizza for their dine-in experience. To be honest, there isn't many restaurants in the Belleville area that would be considered "Autism friendly" which has made my family creatures of habit when dining out. But we have been itching to try something new. So, I took the chance tonight and brought my daughter to your establishment. The dim lights in the diningroom, no radio playing over head and large booth seating really caters to ones that would experience sensory overload in the average restaurant.

Rydan(sp) Our waitress, was more the exceptional. She greeted us with a pleasant smile, kindly asked for my vax info. She confirmed my information and allowed us to choose our own table (Which was pretty great considering most places we've been too, I've actually had to beg to have certain seating to accommodate for my daughter's needs.) My daughter tried to enter the kitchen but our waitress was more than patient with us getting situated as I attempted to redirect her to our booth.

Our waitress took our drink order while pushing an order of breadsticks to our table ASAP for my daughter. The rest of our food order came out perfectly timed, giving us time to enjoy our salads and loaded potatoes first and finally the pizza. She checked on us numerous times to make sure we were happy, refilling my drink and to make sure our food was up to snuff.

The menu options give a great variety and those jalepenos on the loaded potato skins, are a PERFECT touch!! 👌 Overall, our experience at Bourbon St was nothing short of enjoyable. I appreciate the lovely service we were greeted with, the relaxing atmosphere of the restaurant itself and the tasty and hot food we were served.

If anyone in the Autism Community is looking for a friendly place to eat. This is it. Thank you for such a pleasant experience Bourbon St. We look forward...