Max's Coal Oven Pizzeria

When this place first opened, they were putting out some decent edible grub. The coal oven was hot as shit and the only one of it's kind in town. It's been awhile since I've been back. I was in the area so I snuck in for a quick bite. The one thing I did noticed was that there were no coals in the oven or any evidence of it nearby, just wood burning away in there... Not that it's a bad thing but if your resto's name says coal oven, shouldn't it have coal? It's like Lombardi's sans coal, not gonna happen, bro. Maybe it was in there but I didn't seen any because it was the size of gerbil shit.

Garden Salad. The dressing looks and has the same consistency as chocolate pudding. Baffling. The ruffage was quite moist and turned the pudding into liquid diarrhea. How they managed to screw up a salad is beyond words.

Lemon Pepper Wings. These wings so friggin good in the beginning... Now, it's a study in moppishness.You taste nothing except the char from being in the non-coal wood burning oven for way too long. Sprinkling some powder cheese on top of it ain't covering up this debacle. The yogurt sauce is still ok... But even dick cheese sauce would taste good paired with these dried up wings. Have they no shame...

Margherita. Looks decent enough. But I'm still gonna pick at it... Not enough char, the sauce was bland and boring, and the cheese was shredded morsels from a plastic bag. Not exactly "fresh mozzarella". Once the pie got to room temp the cheese started congealing. It was like eating silicone... Put a pepperoni nipple on top and it may be edible that way. The dough had cracker like consistency, not much rise or moisture.

Nothing tastes better than raw flour mixed with saliva to make a new pizza flavored gum. There was at least an 8 ball's worth of uncut AP snow. I shoulda snorted it instead. Bottom line: The pizza is not even worth a ball scratch... They don't even care about the food here anymore, it's just an assembly line now. No quality control... And it shows in the end product. I've had better frozen pizzas from an Easy Bake Oven. If there were coals in there, this wouldn't had happened... Well, maybe it would have anyways. Disappointing and pathetic.

Zeppoli's. Speaking of pathetic. To continue the "who gives a shit" trend here... Look at these wretched specimens. I know most people use pizza dough to make them but they are always too heavy and just nasty to eat. The people who make them correctly uses a lighter dough so they are crispier and fluffier inside. But these things that came out had no rhyme or reason to their shape, it almost looked like cut up chunks of bananas. For a second, I thought they were fried fish, just missing the chips. They were so dense it was like chewing on ballistic gelatin... Tell-tale sign they were "fried" hours ago. They also came out in 30 seconds at room temp from a box underneath the work station. No powder sugar, just some HFCS jizzlobbery pumped all over it. Fuck me.

Don't even bother.

300 Marietta St NW 
Atlanta, Georgia 30313
404-974-2941
http://www.maxsatl.com/