Red Baron Pizza — Restaurant in Big Bear Lake

Grew up in big bear, while I hate this town there's some restaurants I've got fond memories of, which I like to visit on rare occasions I'm there just long enough to get something to eat. When i was a kid, this place was more family oriented, with booths that had vintage pics of big bear on the wall, a few arcade machines, candy dispensers. In 2016, I went here for the first time since I was maybe 11 years old so it had been around 10 years.

I was disappointed to find they've turned their focus more towards being a bar, which really destroyed the environment and made it uncomfortable to eat in. Worst of all, the pizza is subpar. I think next time I decide to get pizza in big bear, I'll take my business to Maggio's since I haven't been there in even longer, in hopes at least they've still upheld their quality after all these years.

Also, as a side note, any pizzeria you go to anymore, pizzas are absurdly priced, I'll willingly pay as much as 100$ at my favorite place where I live now, but Red Baron isn't high enough quality anymore to be charging "I know what I got" prices.

edit: in response to the owner; you don't have to say the recipe was changed, I can tell, that's why I left a negative review. I'm sorry, but if you believe using higher quality ingredients automatically makes food taste good, that there is why the quality of your pizza has drastically gone down hill. Any chef will tell you, you don't need high quality ingredients to make good food because a skilled cook can make good food from just about anything.

So, if you are in fact using higher quality ingredients and your pizza still taste as poor as it does, something is very wrong. All I can say is I'd go back to whatever you were doing around 2005/2006 because you didn't improve your pizzas. But frankly, even if you did, I'm sorry to say it just wouldn't be worth taking the risk of trying again when I've got too many superior pizzerias at home or even a much shorter driving distance to find one to justify it. Even then, there's multiple non-pizzeria's in big bear alone that over all just have way better food that are worth the trip.

I'm not taking any joy in what I've said in my review, I'm actually quite sad because I was hoping for the same delicious pizza I enjoyed when I was a kid and it's simply no...

Pretty good pizza but overall a poorly run establishment. We walked in and put in an order, prepared to wait since we didn’t call ahead. We ordered two pizzas and an order of cinnamon bites. We were told it would be about 25 minutes — cool. We decided to wait in the restaurant and play some games in the arcade. Around 25 minutes later we started standing around the front counter again so we’d hear when they called us. The guy who originally took our order saw us multiple times and didn’t say anything so we figured it just wasn’t done yet. We wait, we wait. Then at 40 minutes we decide to get in the (now) line of people waiting for the cashier. It felt like there was a bunch of people working but no one is coming by the counter despite the line, no one seems to know where any orders are, and repeatedly we see orders partially done and waiting on random stuff like wings, salads etc. which is just silly when those all take way less time to cook than pizzas so there’s just no reason. About 10 minutes later we finally get someone’s attention and find out our pizza has been in the heater by the front counter for about 20 minutes and now they’re waiting on the cinnamon bites that they just put in. Brutal. No apologies, no one offered a drink while we waited, nothing. We ended up getting out of there after about an hour (after being quoted 25 minutes). We did check the pizzas before leaving just to make sure they were right. Then we got home and one pizza hadn’t been sliced and the cherry on top of the already bad experience — the cinnamon bites didn’t have...

Worst experience EVER. We were from out of town renting a cabin for Christmas and called to order a pizza. After giving the address they wanted us to give them directions to the house. We told them several times that we were from out of town and didn’t know the area and they kept telling us we needed to give them directions. We finally asked if they could just GPS it. Then we ordered 2 medium pizzas and were told it would be over $40 and an hour an 45 minutes. About 10 minutes later we decided that was ridiculous and called to cancel the order. The girl on the phone told us the pizzas were just coming out of the oven. We told her we wanted to cancel anyway. She then told us she couldn’t because the driver was already on the way. This was literally 38 seconds after being told it was just coming out of the oven. That’s not even enough time to cut and box the pizza much less have it be on it’s way. We still insisted on canceling the order and were then told they couldn’t because they had already charged the card and the pizza would be there in literally 10 minutes. That was 15 minutes ago. WORST....