Disappointing, St Elmos Pizza Tyger Manor. Disappointing.
We don’t normally eat pizza and invariably when we do, it is home made pizza because quite frankly that just always seems to be the ultimate best (not the cheapest option though mind you). However, we have on more than one or two occasions, in the midst of a FIFA evening hosted at Ryan’s house, popped out to the local St. Elmos (Tyger Manor) for pizza as a sustaining snack break, and last Saturday was no different, after Ryan and I found ourselves at his place playing a couple of rounds of virtual soccer following a successful (and winning) trip to the Stormer’s rugby game at Newlands.
Taking advantage of their special which gives you two deluxe pizzas at the discounted price of just over R120 (about a R20-R30 saving if you opt for the better pizzas on the menu), Ryan and I placed our order for a HONEY & MUSTARD (described as: honey & mustard chicken topped with Elmodews) and a CHEESY STEAK MELT (described as: steak & onion with a swirl of BBQ sauce, covered in melted cheddar cheese). After the prescribed waiting time had passed, we bolted down to Tyger Manor (Eastwoods was surprisingly quiet for a change), picked up the pizza and returned home, eager to scoff down our prize.
The first thing that caught my attention as I unboxed our pizza was the terrible cut job – it was literally as if the pizza cutter had given up on life and was just wildly flopping around in its death throes. But that isn’t really a deal breaker, now is it?
No. What was a deal breaker was the absolute feeling of being cheated out of money as we looked down on what can only be described as the world’s most sparse large pizzas.
The Cheesy Steak Melt had exactly eight pieces of steak neatly placed on each ‘slice’, the pieces being as large as small pencil erasers. The distribution of onion was almost as bad – only about every second piece seemed to yield some trace of the crunchy onion stuff. Now bear in mind this might have been acceptable if this was a small, or perhaps even a medium pizza, but this was a LARGE pizza, best described as being dressed in the toppings of one of those usually crappy frozen ‘pizzas’ that you buy at Pick ‘n Pay!
The honey and mustard chicken pizza wasn’t much better. There was a sparse scattering of chicken to be found on the slices, but as for the Elmodew (i.e. renamed Peppadew to avoid the trademark infringement), there was more or less one half of a Elmodew per slice. Again, completely uncool for a large pizza!
Look, the flavour was good and the pizza was nice and cheesy to eat, but we were left with rather a bad taste in the mouth thanks to the skimpy topping count St. Elmos has all of a sudden decided to bless its customers with.
This never used to be the case with St. Elmos Tyger Manor as far as what we have previously experienced from them, but sadly for the guys, this does now close the St. Elmos chapter as from here on out – pizza at Ryan’s place will undoubtedly come from the far more generous Old Oak Diner going forward!
