TAUNTON – For most people, eating pizza and wings with your friends on a Saturday night doesn’t provide any intrinsic value other than a full stomach.
For pizza connoisseur Todd Mead, it’s both educational and sentimental.
“It feels like a big pot of nostalgia,” Mead said Saturday night at the event he organized as a way to get him back in touch with his South Shore pizza roots, but also gain feedback for his future pizza-making excursions.
Mead organized a blind judging featuring 10 pizza places on the South Shore as a way to gauge how his pizza, MASSively wHOLEhearted Pizza, compares with more established pizza places, as he attempts to launch his South Shore-style pizza truck in Colorado.
“I’m not bound by a recipe. I have a chance to create something special,” Mead said.
“The reason I did this was to get unbiased and accurate feedback on my product against some of the best in the business,” Mead said. “I also wanted to be judged by people with a familiarity with this style, but with a cross-section of ages, genders and people from different parts of the area with different history and therefore different favorites.”
The restaurants in addition to Mead’s MASSively wHOLEhearted Pizza were Lynwood Cafe in Randolph, Town Spa Pizza in Stoughton, Cape Cod Cafe in Brockton, Charlie’s Place in Wareham, O’Toole’s in Whitman, Pizza Tyme in Norton, J’s Flying Pizza in Bridgewater, Smitty’s Pub and Pizza in Taunton and Emma’s Pub and Pizza in Bridgewater.
The restaurants were chosen based on popularity and proximity to Taunton, where the judging was done at Bear’s Den Fly Fishing Co.
The restaurants were asked to have their pizza prepared by 6:30 p.m. and have it delivered to the Bear’s Den by 7 p.m. to ensure as fair a judging as possible.
The judges, all of whom are friends of Mead and affiliated with the South Shore pizza industry, were given 10 small slices of cheese pizza from each place and asked to evaluate it on a scale of 1 to 10.
The slices were all on one plate, flagged and numbered so that the judges could blindly evaluate the pizza, with the names of the pizza being revealed once the judging was complete.
The criteria for the judging included the quality of the cheese, sauce, crust and spices and the overall preparation of the pizza.
“It was like brain overload,” said Jesse Mead, Todd Mead’s brother, after tasting all the pizzas.
The master tally of the ballots revealed the judges ranked Stoughton’s Town Spa Pizza as the best among the 10 pizzas, followed by Taunton’s Smitty’s Pub and Pizza and then Randolph’s Lynwood Cafe.
Brockton’s Cape Cafe Pizza came in fourth, with Mead’s MASSively wHOLEhearted Pizza placing fifth.
A distinctive trait across all the South Shore bar pizzas in processing the judge’s results was a buttery and crunchy crust, followed by the blend of spices and sauce.
“I feel like my pizza is really good, and it was great to be able to measure myself against the best,” Todd Mead said.
Mead documents his pizza-making in videos on his Facebook page called Toddzilla’s South Shore Bar Pizza Project, as well making YouTube videos answering the most common pizza-making questions like, “Why the bottom of the pizza won’t brown,” or “Why does my cheese look funny?”
Mead, a former Raynham resident now living in Colorado, remembers visits to his grandparents in Stoughton being accompanied by visits to Town Spa Pizza, which ranked first among all the pizzas judged.
He’s worked at several bar pizza restaurants across the South Shore and is opening his own pizza eatery.
But it’s not in the form of a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Using his experience of more than 30 years in the auto industry, he’s designed a custom-made food truck, using an RV.
“It’s always been a dream of mine to have my own truck, and now I get to do it,” Mead said.
He has raised more than $1,200 since July 16, when he launched the fundraiser toward his food truck on GoFundMe.
He plans to drive it on the weekends selling his own flavor of South Shore bar pizza, from Fort Collins to Golden, covering over 75 miles.
Mead said he hopes that he can one day open his own pizza restaurant if his pizza truck is successful.
Enterprise staff writer Darvence Chery can be reached at dchery@enterprisenews.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Enterprise today.
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