Review: Tombstone Roadhouse Double Down Deluxe Pizza (New)

We like pizza.  A lot. But you already know that. Because you read our articles regularly. Right??!

For a long time, Tombstone was our favorite frozen pizza. One of our earliest reviews was on Tombstone’s Supreme pie.

We came across the new Tombstone Roadhouse pizzas at the store. They’ve been out for a short time, but we didn’t jump right on them. Why? We were too drunk, and were sleeping it off in an alley. Or something.

There are reasons we hesitated, but more on that later. And nobody ever accused us of being on the cutting edge. We move at a sloth’s pace. Blame booze.

The Tombstone Roadhouse line of pizzas are described on Tombstone’s site as, “Fully loaded with cheese and meat. An authentic tavern style pizza. Roadhouse pizzas have 50% more cheese compared to our original pizzas!”

OK.  Look, we don’t want to dog on Tombstone. But seriously? This is part of why we hesitated to review these pizzas. “Fully loaded with cheese and meat.” So, does that mean that regular Tombstone pies only have half cheese and meat, and aren’t loaded? “…50% more cheese compared to our original pizzas!” Well, sooper dooper! Doesn’t this kind of imply that the regular Tombstone pizzas kind of suck? We don’t understand marketing like this.

Also, what the hell does “Roadhouse” mean?? There is nothing anywhere to explain what “Roadhouse” means in terms of this pizza, or any pizza for that matter. We think of a Patrick Swayze movie, not pizza, when we think of the word “roadhouse!”

Despite all this, our need to eat pizza took over and we decided to review one. We’re suckers for pizza. And we have a duty to our readers. Old news is better than no news!

There are four Roadhouse pizzas available: Piled High Pepperoni, Two Meat Matchup, Double Down Deluxe, and Bring On The Meat. We’re too lazy to describe them all to you. Check out the details here.

We decided to review the Double Down Deluxe. It is the closest to Supreme, and we like Supreme pizzas. And why do we keep capitalizing Supreme?? We’re due to win a journalism award any day now…

The Double Down Deluxe’s description is, “Premium pepperoni, Italian sausage, red and green peppers, caramelized onions, and 2 layers of 100% real mozzarella cheese on a crispy thin crust.” Carmelized onions, you see. Fancy.

We went and bought one, took it out of the package (HO HO!), and here you go…

There is certainly a lot more cheese on this pizza than normal ones. And the cut is different. The pieces are much larger and thicker (HO HO!).

Before we continue, we have to show you something from the back label.

While we were checking out the cooking directions, we noticed the “Thoughtful Portion.” As you can see, it says that 1 portion is 1/5 of the pizza. HA HA HO HO! We can eat the whole damn pizza! Real Snobs eat a lot. And we sure as hell don’t have a “fresh salad” with our pizza! What the hell is this? We can’t wait for companies to start targeting REAL men (and women!) again! Ugh!

OK, back to it…

Notice that the crust is different than regular Tombstone. It is very thin on the edges. It is so thin, it rises above the cardboard base in places. Interesting.

This is a good time to remind you that these are called “tavern style” pizzas (at least they are on the website, not on the packaging!). We don’t really get this at all. “Tavern style” pizza really refers to the way the pizza is cut. “Tavern style” is cut into squares as opposed to wedges (resembling pie slices). “Tavern style” can also refer to Chicago-style thin crust pizza (yes, it’s a thing!). Having been to Chicago and eaten Chicago-style thin crust, we can tell you that this pizza is not modeled after Chicago thin crust pizza at all. The only resemblance to a “tavern style” pizza we see is that the slices are cut into squares in the pictures on the packages.

Authentic!

Enough with the lessons. Back to the pizza…

The directions say to cook the pizza for 24-25 minutes. At 24, it wasn’t done. We gave it another 5 minutes to really crisp up the edges and attempt to brown the cheese slightly like we like it. At 29 minutes, we decided to pull it (HO HO!).

The edges were golden enough. We would like the cheese a little more well-done, but we were afraid to give it longer and burn the crust. With this much cheese, it is pretty much impossible to brown up the middle. The broiler might work, but we didn’t want to risk it on our test pizza.

Again, you can see the crust is very thin just at the edges. Again, it doesn’t touch the counter evenly.

That said, the bottom crust isn’t ridiculously thin. It is only on the very edges that the crust is very thin.

And no, we did NOT cut it into squares to make it “tavern style!”

The pictures make it look like some slices have no toppings. Deception! There are plenty of toppings, but they are under the cheese in many parts. They load quite a damn bit of cheese on these things, and the toppings get underneath it all.

“Double Down” is in the name of this pizza, but it must refer to the 2 layers of cheese. We didn’t think there were more toppings on this pizza than any other.

The toppings are standard fare. We don’t see any difference from regular Tombstone pizzas. The pepperoni is pretty good. The sausage has visible fennel, but it isn’t a very strong taste. The peppers are fine. The “caramelized” onions are kind of funny. We don’t really sense any caramelizing at all. Some pieces looked darker before cooking. Denny doesn’t sense any difference. Herman says there might be a little less harshness to the onions, but he isn’t sure. In other words, don’t put a lot of stock into the onions being “caramelized.”

The toppings are fine for a frozen pizza. Nothing remarkable, but they are certainly not bad.

The sauce is standard Tombstone sauce. It is no different.

The cheese is what makes the real difference here. There is a ton of it. Like we said, there is enough to completely cover the toppings. And having the thick pieces of cheese really makes up a firm cohesive covering of cheese across the pizza after it is cooked. The cheese has a good flavor. It is certainly mozzarella. No complaints here.

The bottom crust is slightly thinner than regular Tombstone pizzas. The edges of the crust are significantly thinner. Despite cooking the pizza on the rack, the bottom crust was not crispy or crunchy at all. Only the edges had crunch. The flavor of the crust is good, but in reality, it is pretty much the same as a regular Tombstone all the way around.

Overall, the pizza is good. But here is the bottom line…with the exception of the crust on the edges, this is basically just a slightly thinner version of a regular Tombstone pizza with a TON of extra cheese on it. And that brings us to the real problem with this pizza.

The price.

These Roadhouse pizzas go for $5.98 at our local Walmart. They are higher in the regular grocery store. Depending on your location, they are significantly higher than that. The value isn’t here, people. The significant extra cost isn’t worth it. Just buy a regular Tombstone, and pile on your own shredded mozzarella. There is no need to spend the extra coin on these pizzas.

Plus, these pizzas just aren’t that big. Sure, there is more cheese. But the overall size is pretty small when compared to other frozen pizzas in this price range. We didn’t compare them to regular tombstone (what do we look like, detectives?), but we would say they are about as big around as the regular ones. Or maybe even a little smaller.

There are quite a few specialty frozen pizzas at the store today that are MUCH bigger than these. For example, Wild Mike’s pizzas are significantly larger pies. And they go for $5.75 at Walmart. In comparison, these Roadhouse pizzas aren’t worth the price increase over regular Tombstones.

This is what we were afraid of, and the rest of the reason we hesitated to review these. The price turned us off right away.

Tombstone didn’t screw up here. The pizza is good, but it just isn’t worth the extra money. This is simply a marketing technique. Introduce something new, take up extra shelf space in the freezer, and sell a bunch of pizzas. But we doubt most people will go back and get them again.

We won’t.