Dunkin' Donuts Personal Pan Pizzas

Dunkin' Donuts is entering the madcap world of lunch-hour fast food with 5-inch personal pan pizzas and flatbread sandwiches. (See the official site at https://www.dunkindonuts.com/aboutus/products/NGSS.aspx)

We decided to try out the pizzas because we have a broader frame of reference. (For those of you who are used to our normal vocabulary level, that means we eat more pizza than flatbread sandwiches.) After reading our thoughts, you'll know why we think Dunkin' Donuts should change their slogan to Everyone Runs From Dunkin'!

B-Com Says:

Before I continue, let's remember that we went to a doughnut shop to get a pizza. Obviously, this is not Pizzaria Uno's or even Pizza Hut. It's certainly not your old-school neighborhood pizzaria where Uncle Guido has been hand-crafting deep-dish delights for over half a century. This is a doughnut shop looking to cash in on the lunchtime crowd by offering a 5-inch personal pizza you can whiz through the drive-thru and bring back to the office to pound down before your 1:00 meeting.

That being said, we decided to sample the cheese ($2.99) and the pepperoni ($3.29) varieties. Tryin the cheese first, I found it quite tasty. I came in expecting a reheated frozen pizza, and that's what I got, but the cheese was much better than Eelios or any of the dozens of other frozen pizza brands I've tried over the years. It actually made me look forward to the pepperoni because that's generally my pizza preference.

This is where the wheels fell off.

The pepperoni pizza was of a lower quality than most frozen pizzas I've tried: it was cardboardy, dry, and all-around pathetic. If you chopped up some mildly spicy meat-product, added a few drops of uninspiring sauce, and dropped it on a cracker (or any other vehicle on which to shove it down your piehole,) you could easily match this experience. As much as I enjoyed the cheese pizza, my experience with the pepperoni through the whole thing off. Whoever approved this experiment should be feverously working on a new-and-improved model because this one is a

TURD!!!

J-Lam Says:

Pizza Hut and Domino's have nothing at all to worry about.

Now, I understand why Dunkin' Donuts is heading in this direction because I'm probably the only guy in upstate New York who is willing to eat two Boston Creme doughnuts for lunch. But the personal pan pizzas offered don't make me want to spend my lunch break hunting up a Dunkin' Donuts.

First of all, for the price (which isn't much, but runs around the same price as a standard burger or chicken sandwich at any another fast food joint) there's not a lot of food here. The pizzas are only five inches across, and about an inch of that is dry crust. Taking my time with it, I got about seven bites out of the thing, and it felt like less. Not that I'm touting a huge burger for any particular reason, but when I spend a couple bucks on a Whopper, I walk away feeling like I actually ate something.

Then we get to the taste. Unlike my esteemed colleague, I had the displeasure of trying the pepperoni first. It reminded me of a dusty coaster that someone spilled pizza sauce on. The tiny pepperoni cubes were chewy and lacked flavor, and there was far less cheese on it than on its better-looking older brother. I struggled through it, already thinking up what incredibly mean things I could say about it in this blog.

Fortunately for pepperoni, I ate the cheese next, and it did a fairly good job of bringing me back into an agreeable state of mind. (In other words, it caused me to edit out all my nastiness except the coaster comment above.) Although still suffering from the same size and satisfaction shortcomings of the pepperoni variety, at least these seven bites were flavorful and enjoyable.

Overall, though, even the power of the cheese pizza can't turn this bad idea into anything other than a

TURD!!