Dial “M” for Pizza: Mellow Mushroom and Manhattan Pizza
Mellow Mushroom, 960 Hwy 98E, Sunstations - Destin, 650-6420

Manhattan Pizza & Italian Restaurant, 255 Miracle Strip Pkwy, Fort Walton Beach, 243-4466

By Bruce Collier September 8, 2005 Issue

This is not a pizza roundup, just a double-headed review of two of this area’s sit-down pizza restaurants. Both offer takeout. Both also offer much more than just pizza.

First stop was Mellow Mushroom, in Destin. As the name and the decor suggest, someone in charge has a feel for the surreal whimsy of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The walls and tables are crowded with dozens of brightly colored, anthropomorphic mushrooms and mushroomettes. Happy suns, placid moons, and all the rest of that Peter Max/R. Crumb milieu are here to entertain you as you try to explain it all to your kids.

The menu, however, does not fool around. Mellow Mushroom offers a seriously large and varied selection of traditional and specialty pizzas in three sizes, along with salads, calzones, pretzels, and “monumental hoagies.” You can have lunch or dinner, and there’s a full bar, with a good selection of beers.

We started with spinach, bacon and mushroom salad, with the house “Esparanza” dressing, balsamic vinaigrette. As proved to be the case with everything at Mellow Mushroom, it was fresh, and looked freshly assembled. There were plenty of sliced button mushrooms, sweet tomatoes, Parmesan cheese and two hot and crisp strips of applewood-smoked bacon. It was a good start.

Other starters include hummus, garlic and cheese breads, and chef, Greek, and Caesar salads. There’s also a daily soup.

We decided to share a pair of hoagies. We ordered the vegetarian avocado sandwich, with sliced avocados, lettuce, tomato, provolone, onions and sprouts. It was heated just about right, and the avocados were ripe and buttery.

The Italian, likewise heated, featured ham, pepperoni, provolone, onions and, yes, sprouts. Any restaurant that sports the word “mellow” in its title has to offer sprouts—it’s a food ordinance.

Both sandwiches were excellent, and there are 13 others to choose from, including steak and cheese, BLT, mushroom club, meatball, ham and cheese, turkey and cheese, and a Portobello mushroom. All are served with sprouts, except the meatball and steak.

We split a 10-inch specialty pizza, the jerk chicken with pineapple. It was, of course, huge and unnecessary after a salad and two sandwiches. It was too good to leave or box up, so ate it we did. It was not as spicy as suggested, but I expect if you told the obliging servers to spice it up, they would smile in a mellow way and see it done.

Other pizza choices included traditional pizzas with pretty much anything you can imagine on them, a gourmet white pizza, barbecue chicken, “mighty meaty,” veggie, Hawaiian, a pesto and mushroom number called the Magical Mystery Tour, and chicken cordon bleu. That’s just a sample. The full menu deserves study.

You won’t believe this, but we ate dessert. We each had a cookie—chocolate chip and macadamia nut, served hot with vanilla and chocolate ice cream and syrup.

The service at Mellow Mushroom is friendly and relaxed, without being lax. Our server apologized at the end of the meal for keeping us waiting on coffee. “What we had wasn’t fresh, so I made a fresh pot,” she said. Not every server would have done that.

Off to Manhattan

Our next pizza encounter was at Manhattan Pizza and Italian Restaurant in Fort Walton Beach. This is also a sit-down place, with a little more of a dining room atmosphere to it. Tables and booths are arranged in a roughly L-shaped layout, with framed posters and photos of New York on the walls. The bar offers beer and wine.

In addition to pizza, Manhattan Pizza offers traditional Italian main course items such as shrimp scampi, chicken and veal Marsala, pasta primavera, lasagna, and various pastas with meat, seafood, and meatless sauces. Salads, classic and specialty pizzas, subs, and calzones are also available. Lunch time diners in a hurry can start right in on a daily all-you-want buffet, which this day there offered assorted pizzas, lasagna, sides and salad.

We started with an antipasto salad, full of ham, salami, black olives and tomatoes, with a lot of shredded mozzarella cheese all over it. Other salad choices include Caesar, chicken Caesar, chef, Greek, spinach and garden salads, with a choice of seven dressings.

More substantial starters included bruschetta, wings, stuffed shrimp, stuffed mushrooms, an Italian quesadilla, and spinach and artichoke dip.

We ordered a sandwich—a very traditional chicken parmigiana, which we split. It came hot, nearly bursting out of the bread, and with just enough tomato sauce to flavor but not blanket the chicken.

For our pizza, we split a “white pizza,” with just mozzarella and ricotta cheese, and no sauce. This is a simple, very creamy and tasty pizza, best eaten smoking hot, which it was.

Other choices include meat lovers, vegetarian, “N.Y. gridlock,” which is nine toppings plus extra cheese, and the usual sausage, pepperoni, anchovy, etc. toppings. You can also choose from an assortment of specialty toppings such as fresh basil, feta, artichoke hearts, or prosciutto.

For the sweet tooth, Manhattan Pizza serves a daily list of (what else?) New York style cheesecakes, including plain, Oreo, Butterfinger, caramel, chocolate, and about six more. Not all are available every day, so you have to ask. We got the Oreo and Butterfinger. Both were generous cuts, creamy and free of fake whipped cream. If you do as we did, and box as you go, there will be room for these.

In these trying times, pizza still has to rank high among America’s favorite comfort foods. Though neither of the above restaurants appears to do home delivery, their in-house wares are worth spending a little precious fuel, or putting on your shoes just long enough to run in for takeout.

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