Surf Rider Pizza — Restaurant in La Mesa

Service was very good, absolutely no problems on that front.

This review can only really address the pizza, as we didn't try anything else. I really wanted to like the place, but...

The pizza itself wasn't great. To be clear, it wasn't bad, but I would compare the quality as being slightly less than something you might buy from, say, Round Table Pizza but better in overall quality than Pizza Hut. The kind you might expect to get for free served at a club meeting in college. My family compared it to the kind of pizza you can get at a new York park off a cart for $1 a slice. This would be fine if this place's main competitors were fast-food pizza joints, but this isn't a fast-food pizza joint. Significantly worse than the pizza you can get at Lidos Italian Foods over in Lemon Grove. In short: the quality does not match the price.

The other factor was that the toppings were weirdly sparse. Looking at the other pictures here, I can't quite figure out what happened. Perhaps the toppings are better if you order one of the specific specialty pizzas. We ordered three toppings, and in our case it appears to be that the more toppings you order, the less of any individual topping you get: All toppings were roughly equidistant apart, which meant that on any given (rather large) slice we would get lucky to have 3 pieces of canadian bacon. Most of them had two, with one pair of slices having 1.5 pieces between them. This appeared to be true for mushrooms as well. Olives were the exception, with as many as for or five populating each slice, like forlorn islands amidst a great...

This place has a fun, light, welcoming ambience. The decor is very SoCal w/ paintings and wall hangings like a VW van coming thru the wall. It was pretty crowded on a Friday evening when we came. We had to wait for seats at the bar. But not too long. (I guess there was a birthday party group taking up one side of the outside patio seating. There is a kids area where they were so the group was a bunch of families and friends.) It was pretty cold outside and there are only so many heaters goin in certain places. But people didn't seem to mind. The outside seating is very open and spacious. Inside the seating is pretty limited. But I do think the counter/window seats are kinda cool. The design of this venue is not typical. It's has a fun feel. Anyway, we were thankful for our bar seating inside. We ordered a full pizza pie, but had one side the Surf Rider and the other half the Basil Pesto w/ Ricotta Cheese. It was ok. I think it needs some tweaking. We like thin crust, but it was a bit dry and bland. The Surf Rider toppings were a bit too salty and oily. If that wasn't so, it would have been pretty good, especially with the whole cloves of garlic! The flavors and all of the Basil Pesto Ricotta were great, just a bit too much oil. It wasn't salty like the Surf Rider. I'd order that again. Oh man, I totally loved the Thorn Coconut Porter on tap! It was so tasty and perfect to wash down the pizza. Overall, it's a cool friendly place to hang out. The outside seating has some comfy niches to sit and chill with friends or fam. I'll give it 5 Stars when the...

All right, I have to be honest, I'm between 3 and 4 stars on this place. The pizza was great! Nice thin crust , an even layer of toppings that had great flavor and the pizza held up well when picked up! We had the Surf Rider pizza and let me tell you, the amount of garlic on this pizza is not for the faint-hearted!! It was delicious, nice and roasted and melted in your mouth but it had a ton of garlic on it!! We love wings and we're so anxious to try them, we got the plain dirty wings with blue cheese. First of all, these wings are extremely puffy, they later told me that they are first baked and then fried which made them puff up in almost a spongy way. We did not enjoy them at all unfortunately. The green sauce was tasty and had a nice jalapeno zing to it, but the blue cheese was lacking in flavor. We grabbed some garlic knots and those were very tasty with a very flavorful marinara sauce to dip them in. We also decided to try a swell cookie and opted for the Blonde Rocky road. This was unlike any cookie I have ever had, it seems like maybe they fold egg whites into their batter. They were more of a light and crisp cookie, it tasted good but was not my favorite. We would definitely go back for pizza, garlic knots and their wonderful assortment of beer! Atmosphere was also very cool, we sat inside as it was a chilly night, but they provide nice patios...