The House of Pizza (and Hamburgers and Italian and Chinese Food)

My birthday is coming up this Friday, so we decided to go out for dinner tonight to a place we’d been talking about for a while now: The House of Pizza. But it’s not just ye run-o-the-mill pizza joint. Oh no. It also serves hamburgers, sub sandwiches, Italian and, most strange of all, Chinese. We’ve been getting flyers for the place every other week for the past few months, and we’ve always wondered, “How can a place that does all this do any one of them well?”

So we decided to check the place out. DeAnn looked up the directions and we set out, through rush hour(s) traffic, to the House of Pizza. About half an hour and 2 miles later, we arrived at the address Google gave us. I kid you not, the place was a lean-to shack. It had a certain hole-in-the-wall roadside café quality that you’d expect from a horror novel or scary movie. Not a good first impression. We had to ask ourselves if we really wanted to do this, but resolved to not leave until we could give the place a thumbs up or a thumbs down. That and the kids ate free.

In we went. It was clean, if not worn in – the kind of place that has a stained floor and bathroom sink and graffiti on the tables, but sure has pretty light fixtures. The kid that was our server greeted us politely and helped us get a highchair for Clara. We sat down and ordered drinks before diving into the smorgasbord of food offerings. Colin had a cheese pizza, while the rest of us had varied flavors of Chinese chicken, with a side of cheese rangoons. When the rangoons came out, they were not folded in the typical rangoony way. They were more like cream cheese empanadas… Not that they were bad, just interesting and unexpected and not rangoons. The rest of the dinner wasn’t bad: to their credit it was quickly prepared, nicely presented and didn’t taste half bad either. They didn’t HQ any of it to be sure (the eggrolls left much to be desired), but it definitely wasn’t bad. We tipped well and ventured back home.

With the rampant plant sex filling the air, my allergies have been leaving me feeling very run down. I decided to take a nap before Einherjar. I woke up in time to fully gear up and run out to the Testing Grounds. We took down the first set of mobs with little difficulty. The boss this time was a buffalo. The buffalo has a nasty knock-back attack that scatters people and makes you have to run around to get back in range. I lost 2 TP moves and half my 2hr to that thing tromping around. We wore the buffalo boss down to 30% before we were kicked out. If we’d done what we were doing for the last 3 minutes, we would have had a real chance at winning. Still is not my favorite event, but it’s come a long way from the last few times I went.
Keri and I rounded out the evening chasing around turtles in Beadeux. The Sapphire Quadav dropps scrolls that we both need for BLM, and all of the coffer Quadav drop keys we’ll need on our BST. We went through two rounds of repops before we called it a night. Got one key of the two we need, and no scrolls, so we’ll be back…