The Good: Pizza tastes good, Pizza deal was good.
The Bad: Drink prices are high, Regular pizza prices are not great, Lowering values, Not best pizza.
The Basics: Home of substandard pizzas at ever declining values, Little Caesars is a chain that is losing its appeal with every passing year.
Sometimes, I like to look at the evolution of things and see how they get from one place to another. In the case of Little Caesars Pizza, I've watched as the smaller pizza chain has evolved in the course of my lifetime and, sadly, the direction it has gone in has not been a positive one. When I was a child, Little Caesars had a pretty decent deal and philosophy. It fell off my radar for a few years only to pop back on with their extraordinary $5.00 “Hot And Ready” Pizza deal. Now, however, their mediocre pizzas are becoming pricier and it is impossible for me to recommend the chain, even though I do eat there from time to time.
Location
Little Caesars Pizza is everywhere in the United States, but I've found them more on the East Coast than the West. The best Little Caesars Pizza experience I ever had was actually inside a K-Mart in Lubbock, Texas. Locally, there are Little Caesars Pizza joints throughout Upstate New York.
Most locations feature booths that seat four to six people and most locations I have found have only a few booths as the restaurant seems to prefer to do business via take-out. The booths are designed - like many fast food places - to encourage patrons to get comfortable, but not too comfortable. As a result, most people eating at Little Caesars will be in and out within an hour.
Waitstaff
Little Caesars tend to employ younger people as it is not what is generally considered a glamour job. Employees at most Little Caesars restaurants I have frequented have averaged between 17 and 30 years old. As with any chain, quality of service is rather variable. At most Little Caesars locations, customers seat themselves and pick food up at a counter.
Little Caesars does not have a service-oriented dining experience and I've not had a bad dining experience there largely because most of the time I get take-out.
Food
Little Caesars serves pizza. It's not the best pizza in the world; my brother does not eat it because he claims the sauce is grainy. I tend to like food which is very (physically) hot. Little Caesars pizzas, despite the claim of being hot and ready, are seldom as hot as I would like. The pizzas are bland with a tomato sauce which is mediocre and not richly spiced. The cheese is a very mass-produced mozzarella cheese flavor to it. Crusts vary, but most of the Little Caesars pizzas I've had have been overcooked and very dry. They do not seem to oil their crusts and as a result, the crusts are very dry usually.
In general, though, Little Caesars advantage seems to be that the pizzas are quick, if not terribly good. Their pepperoni pizzas never are overloaded with pepperoni, but they are better than the cheapest pizzas one might get from the freezer section of a supermarket.
Little Caesars sells bottled soda and waters and their prices are in no way competitive. A two liter of soda costs two dollars at our local Little Caesars.
The only other thing worth buying at Little Caesars is the breadsticks. The breadsticks are soft, buttery and covered in parmesan cheese and garlic salt. I've never had Little Caesars breadsticks that are not hot, buttery and delicious (except when they have been served cold).
Overall
If it seems like I am skimping out on the “food” section of this review, there is a reason for that. Little Caesars tends to trade on cheese, pepperoni, and sausage pizzas with other orders taking a long time to cook and being of a similar mediocre quality. When I was younger, the motto for Little Caesars was “Pizza! Pizza!” and the reason for that was that when one ordered a pizza, Little Caesars delivered two. The constant deal was essentially “two for the price of one.” Now, it is just “cheap pizza.” Little Caesars has gone from “Hot and Ready” for $5.00 to $5.95 in the past year and, sadly, the added expense has been enough to drive our business away. The pizzas are just not that good. We'd rather pay a little bit more and get something that tastes extraordinary.
** That, FYI, is what happened to me in Lubbock, Texas. I ordered an all meat pizza and I had a pizza for $13.00 which had over an inch solid of ground beef, bacon, ham, sausage and pepperoni on it. That has been the exception to the rule in my Little Caesars experience and proof positive that everything is bigger in Texas. No other Little Caesars have ever come close to making a pizza like that. Believe me, I've tried to get the local ones to.
For other restaurants, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Ponderosa Steakhouse
Jreck Subs
Outback Steakhouse
3.5/10
For other restuarant and food reviews, be sure to check out my index page by clicking here!
© 2011, 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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