A & A Pagliai's Pizza — Restaurant in Iowa City

Placed an order to go. I was told it would be thirty minutes for the pizza to be ready. I showed up at thirty minutes. She girl at the register was looking for my ticket so I could pay, and she found it at the assembly line. The pizza had not even gone into the oven yet. It was not even finished being prepared. She told me it would be about thirty more minutes, and that they got busy. The way she talked, she was trying to make me believe that the time from when she finished taking my order until the time she turned it in, they were hammered with orders, doubling my time. I was not overly happy, but I placed my card on the counter to pay, but explaining that the service was unacceptable. Honestly, why else do I call in a to go order? If I had all the time to wait, I would just show up, and place the order in person.One of the guys on the assembly line turns around, and in quite a bitchy tone explains that 'they cannot make the pizzas cook any faster!' I do not tolerate being argued with in obvious cases of the business screwing up. I asked to speak with the manager. He could not be pulled away from what he was doing next to the guy that was arguing with me. Now it is quite obvious that the place suffers from ineffective management. I looked at the manager, and I said "Now your employees are arguing with customers?" All he did was tell the cashier that I could pay for the pizza, or they could cancel the order. He was less than ten feet away, and he could not take a moment to deal with a customer complaint on their service, or even deal with his employees arguing with customers.I understand they are busy, and upsetting one person means little, but if this is the trend, the owner may want to look into it. Otherwise, he may find more and more customers unwilling to deal with a poorly...

I lived in Iowa City for my first 22 years, California for eight since. Pagliai's is the hometown restaurant I miss the most. I would eat here weekly in college, and I still stop in whenever I'm in town. It's a local hotspot, somewhere I always run into a familiar face even now.

They make a simple but delicious pizza with crust in a style which I think is called "Chicago thin", much firmer and crunchier than New York style and nothing like the deep dish most people think of when you say Chicago. Pagliai's is the best example of it I've found in Iowa. In California, nothing's even close - there's Italian-style, New York-style, deep dish, and Pizza Hut-ish chain pizza.

If the crust is too thin for you, order double-crust. My friends and I would always order two pizzas: (1) sausage, green pepper, onion, double-crust, cut in squares; (2) green pepper, black pepper, onions, cut in squares. I recommend them both. More common pizzas like ham/pineapple are good here, too, as is garlic baked into the crust.

Price: as a college student, I would have come here even more if it weren't so expensive. As a professional in California, it seems cheap. So all I should say to you is two people splitting a well-topped large with generous tip and tax costs $13 apiece; make up your own mind...

Friday night, very busy. But that's no excuse for a tasteless, flour and water, tough "thin crust" that's no so thin and I almost chipped my tooth on. A bunch of 18 year olds in the window making pizza for the first time. With at least ten people behind the counter, you still have to wait 20 minutes to get out of there -- poor business model only have one, again very inexperienced, person taking the money. In a university town, I hate to think of how many walkouts they have. Poor service from very young and inexperienced waitstaff. Anchovies that smelt like they'd been aged in a backwater outhouse for a month before use -- in summer. Even Pizza Hut and frozen DiGiorno is better than this. Very limited and unimaginative menu of pizza only. I can only think all the reviewers of this place have never tasted real food before (kids just leaving home) and they're mostly from that party school U of I and have been drunk when they ate there. Did I mention that it's also very overpriced. Save your dough,...