D'Amore's Pizza Connection, Westwood - You're Better off Grilling at Home

D'Amore's Pizza Connection
1136 Westwood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024
310.208.7077

Before I proceed to only half-bash D'Amore's Pizza in Westwood for neither being so good that I gush like a schoolgirl nor being so bad that I can displace some repressed childhood bitterness about pull-top canned processed meat onto greasy-yet-dry Italian sausage, but being only right smack dab in the middle of halfway to so very average that all I can do is nothing, let's give away some books, shall we?

Oh, yeah. Remember that? The Cookbook-a-Day Giveaway during the entire month of June.

Oh, double yeah. Remember that? The month of June is my birthday month.

According to my extraordinarily accurate calculasians, we were about three days shy of June's month-end, and since 27 is a good 75% of the way through 30 days, it makes perfect sense that the book we're giving away today is number 15 out of 30: Grilled Pizzas and Piadinas, in which "pizza" is pizza and "piadina" is bourgie-talian for "tortilla."

The winner of the book, who didn't list a single Michael Jackson song, not even my favorite song PYT, not even the easiest possible answer Beat It, not even Thriller, the greatest stupidest music video of all time, is...

...oddlyme. Please drop an email with your mailing address to me at sarah[at]tastespotting[dot]com and leave a comment on this post so I know to catch it before it possibly gets sucked into the blackspamhole. Because you know, the last thing you want to think about is something of yours getting sucked into a blackspamhole.

Which brings me to D'Amore's.

The reason we ended up at D'Amore's is that it was not only new to us, but at the time, it looked new because it only had a temporary large-banner-print-at-Kinko's sign flapping above the door. Something new, though possibly bad, was a far better option than familiar, franchised mediocrity.

But who knew that D'Amore's would be new mediocrity!

The restaurant's space is nothing special - a non-descript storefront among other non-descript storefronts in a college nabe (UCLA's Westwood Village, for the uninitiated). The restaurant has a typical pizza parlor decor, and I suspect it was going for that "New York pizzeria" look and feel. We sat at a table against the large windows in the front, partially because it was weirdly dark for midday further back inside the dining area, and mostly because there were a lot of college students making too much noise back there.

The Chopped Antipasto Salad was fine. The Garlic Rolls were fine. The pizzas, except for the odd texture of the crust that went so far the extreme of "thin crust" that it tasted like a cracker, were, essentially, fine. In summary, everything was fine.

But I don't ever need to go back for "fine."

Who Else (Dis)Connected at D'Amore's Pizza Connection? (not many else)
~ 12 reviews averaged 3½ stars on Yelp
~ Citysearchers rate D'Amore's higher with 4½ stars

tags :: food : and drink : italian : restaurants : reviews : los angeles