Campus Pollyeyes: A TasteHive Review
Before I made my quick road trip over to Wisconsin with my buddy @a4xjeeper, my wife and I drove down to Toledo, OH to watch my niece play softball with her college team the Tiffin Dragons. It was a bloodbath of a game unfortunately, which I talk about a bit in this post on my other account.
Prior to the game, we met my sister in law down on the Campus of University of Toledo to grab some lunch. We occasionally meet down in Toledo because it is a good halfway point for them coming up from Columbus, OH and us coming down from the middle of Michigan.
We decided to try something new this trip and that led us to Campus Pollyeyes.
Oh, by the way, I realize there is no such thing as TasteHive. There totally should be though. One of the only things I miss about the old days of Hive is Tasteem. @slobberchops and I used to have a blast posting about our different dining experiences. My posts were always free of mushy peas and actually quite good.
Anyway, the building for Campus Pollyeyes actually looks a lot bigger from the outside than it is on the inside. They do have a second story to the dining area, but that was closed off due to the lack of customers. I imagine on a Friday night this place is probably packed.
The establishment is actually kind of triangle shaped when you get inside. We tucked ourselves away in a far corner booth and waited for @mrsbozz's sister to show up. It turned out she was running late, so we went ahead and placed the order for all of us. Being mainly a pizza and sandwich joint, we wanted to try out their pizza for sure.
You can just see the bottom of the second level seating area in this shot that my wife took. Like I said, while they have a large bar area, the actually seating options are pretty limited. We did noticed a lot of people come and go with carryout orders while we were waiting for my sister in law, so it could be this is more of a take out place.
It appears this place is somewhat of a local chain having a few locations spread across the central Ohio area. Three to be exact. This one in Toledo and then one in Findlay and one in Bowling Green. Pretty much right down the I-75 corridor.
They claim to have the "world's best stuff breadsticks" and after a couple of bites, I do have to admit that they are pretty dang good. You can get an order of three or six. We didn't realize how big they were going to be, so we went with the order of six.
They supposedly house make their own ranch dressing. I have always been a firm believer that you can tell the quality of an establishment based on their ranch dressing. This stuff was pretty bussin. So much so that we asked for an extra cup of it when we took our leftovers.
If you weren't hungry before, there are some more pictures of the breadsticks just to push you over the edge. Apparently you can stuff the breadsticks with any topping(s) of your choice just like a pizza. Actually probably more like a Calzone or Stromboli, but you get the idea. I can honestly never remember the difference between those two things. I think one has sauce in it and the other doesn't or something like that.
We decided to go with a 14" vegetarian pizza, but then we added ham to the top of it. My wife likes a lot of veggies, I like meat, so we compromise. It works out pretty well. They offer you three different kinds of crust. There is a "pan" crust, their traditional crust, and a thin crust.
We picked the traditional crust, but honestly it was so think that it made us wonder what their pan crust is like!
I've gotta be honest here, the pizza looked a lot better than it tasted. It's not that it was bad, (I don't know if there is such a thing as bad pizza), but it was just kind of meh for us. We actually decided that the smarter move would have been to get the breadsticks stuffed with the toppings we wanted and then just called that our meal.
They were significantly better than the pizza.
We actually ended up taking home three of the six breadsticks and more than half of the pizza. It was a lot of food. More than we had anticipated.
I think I might have liked the pizza better if we had gone with the thin crust. I tend to prefer thinner crust anyway, but as I said before, this traditional crust was so thick that it almost tasted uncooked and doughy in some areas. There's a reason why Chicago style pizza takes close to an hour to be ready, it just takes that long to get all that dough cooked. I think a lot of places go for speed versus quality and things ended up falling through the cracks. That was likely the case here.
Campus Pollyeyes had a pretty decent selection of sandwiches too that I think I would probably lean towards trying if we ever found ourselves back in one of the locations. For the stuff breadsticks alone I would definitely come back.
If you ever get the chance, it is certainly worth a visit. If you are a pizza snob, just be ready to be a little let down. Then again, it might have just been an off day for them and you might have the best pie of your life here (unless you're from New York, not much beats a slice from NY). I guess you will just have to try for yourself to find out!
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
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@tasteem was one of the ninja-staked stash delegated recipients.. as I remember. It was very much abused and 90% of the reviews were terrible. I don't think we need it anymore.. the vote about $2 or something heh..
I wish we could get Ranch at Pizza places. It's something I fell in love with over there, and has yet to catch on here.
Oh, don't act like you didn't love it! If you want to point out abuse of ninja mined stake, Tasteem would definitely be in the list, but they were far from the worst offender. The fact that I was able to hit the top three from time to time proves that it wasn't all rigged. Their algorithm was flawed for sure, but the idea behind the project and the front end they developed was pretty legit. You really can't beat a flavorful ranch dressing!
It was good, but that was a different time. It all went to shit when JS pulled the delegation. It crumbled like dust. There's been nothing similar since.
Very true. Many decent projects folded when the delegations were pulled. It only would have taken a bit smarter management and they could have built a position to carry them through even after the delegation was gone.