Paddy’s Brick Oven Pizza – Hard to Find, Worth the Search

I’ve got a friend who has created a group he calls “Hole in the wall weekdays”. Each week the group chooses a different local non-chain restaurant to visit. Periodically we’re able to join the group and indulge in some awesome local cooking. This week the group stopped in at Paddy’s Brick Oven Pizza in Mandarin. Paddy’s is located just north of I295 on San Jose blvd. I actually had quite a bit of trouble finding the restaurant. Eventually I figured out the a Krystal restaurant located in front of Paddy’s almost completely blocks it from view. So if you’re going to Paddy’s find Krystal and you’ll know you’re in the right place. Paddy’s is a family owned restaurant specializing in hand tossed pizza. They offer dine in, delivery, or carry out. They also offer a variety of other Italian favorites.

Paddys Taco Pizza

Address: 9850-1 San Jose Blvd, Jacksonville, FL, 32257

Phone: 880-7777

Website:
http://www.paddyspizza.com

Food: We started off the meal with garlic knots(small $3.49 large $5.99). They were tasty. Paddy’s succeeded in getting a good amount of garlic, seasoning, and butter on top of the knots without drowning them. At the same time there was plenty of additionally butter and garlic goodness on the bottom of the plate so that if you enjoy drowning them in buttery garlic goodness you had that option.  While we were waiting on the pizza to arrive I decided to try the salad bar. The salad bar is really tiny but all the items were really high quality so that was fine for $2.99. I really appreciated that the cheese on the salad bar was a shredded cheese blend that tasted soooooo much better than your average salad bar cheese. I suspect it was shredded fresh off a block of cheese rather than the standard cheese out of a bag that many places use on their salad bar. For the main attraction we tried the taco pizza. It was outstanding. It legitimately tasted as if you took a taco and subbed out pizza dough for tortilla. Tasty taco meat and onions mixed nicely with ranchero taco sauce covered with a wonderful blend of mozzarella, cheddar, and monterey cheese topped with lettuce and tomato. This all was baked on top of a southwest seasoned crust. I started out skeptical of whether it might just taste like hamburger pizza. That made a believer out of me. This pizza definitely embodied the taco pizza name.

Paddys Interior

Service: Our service was attentive. We were dining with a group of 8 and the waitress stayed on top of pretty much everything. The only minor hiccup was one we didn’t even realize. Half way through the meal the waitress brought out a 2nd Stromboli for one of the guys we were dining with explaining that they accidentally served him the wrong Stromboli. He hadn’t even realized it happened and loved the one they had served him. They boxed it up for him so he could take it home. In my book it’s great service when management takes the initiative to correct mistakes even when they aren’t brought to their attention as a problem.

Positives:

• Good service
• Good speciality pizzas- taco, hamburger, BBQ chicken

Negatives:

• Hard to find

Paddys Garlic Knots