Provo’s New Pizza Pie Café: The real Italian flare that goes into real American pizza

Kurt Poecker/ UVU Review

This Italian-inspired while Americanized restaurant is a great place to enjoy an evening with friends, colleagues and loved ones. You can even grab food to go because although it’s a buffet, you can select delicious items from their to-go menu.

As you make your way to enter the restaurant, the smell of tomato sauce, cheese and bread assails your senses before you even set foot in the door. In the host area, the happy-to-help employees are eager and excited to see you. The main front dining room is one of four different dining areas, each one having its own theme ranging from sports to state license plates and is usually filled with happy and hungry customers.

The pizza, pasta and salad buffet is phenomenal. Try one thing or one of everything.

To start off a great all-you-can-eat meal the right way, there is a salad bar with many different options of greens, vegetables, toppings and dressings.

Then on to the pizza and pasta sections — the buffet serves your average cheese and pepperoni pizzas as well as supreme, pesto veggie, meat lover’s, barbeque chicken and many others, including a special requested pizza. They also serve bread sticks and desert pizzas like crisp cobbler-style fruit pizzas of peach and cherry, as well as Oreo and cinnamon sugar pizza.

At the pasta bar, step one is to choose one type or any combination of types of noodles from spaghetti, fettuccine, angel hair, penne, bowtie, cavatappi and radiotore. You then choose sauce from alfredo, roasted red pepper, carbonara and marinara, with both meat and non-meat options — you can mix these too.

The pricetag on this broad array of options is a pleasant surprise. On a normal night without discounts it is only $6.99 for the buffet. For the more thrifty route, anyone can sign up for their texting plan, which sends out VIP information on discounts and deals as soon as they’re available, as well as specific deals for members only, like the lunch specials for $4.

If you are feeling risky, have an eating contest with friends. This gives you the opportunity to try a wide variety of what the restaurant has to offer. Between salad, pasta, pizza and breadsticks you will find yourself completely full before long. Both the cheese and cinnamon bread sticks are to die for as well as their dessert pizza. It was an amazing, filling and inexpensive experience.

This is one place you cannot afford to miss out on. That $6.99 may be one of the best $6.99s you have ever spent.

Pizza Pie Cafe… Real American pizza

2235 N. University Parkway

Provo, Utah, 84604

801-373-5561

Hours:

Mon-Thur: 11 am-10 pm

Fri-Sat: 11 am-11 pm

Sun: Closed