I’m a cynic when it comes to Red’s Savoy Pizza. It’s garbage pizza, in the sense where it’s an imbalanced mess of stuff strewn together with obnoxiously biting sauce. Their location in Saint Paul is classic with rude staff with a dark, campy interior. It’s a staple of Saint Paul and it works for what it is. Unfortunately, they’ve been aggressively expanding by taking over struggling independent pizzerias.
I visited their location in Hudson, which used to be Barley’s Pizza. I remember asking staff there soon after they re-opened if they’ve changed anything. “No, everything’s the same, except the pizza’s better now.” They were wrong.
I avoided visiting the new location in Uptown after they replaced Golooney’s East Coast Pizza, which was horrible to begin with. I couldn’t imagine it being better. Finally this month I gave it a go.
My pepperoni slice took about 5 minutes to get during lunch and was received in tin foil inside a styrofoam box. The cheese was tasteless, the pepperoni were plain and the crust was crunchy on the edge and very soft towards the tip. It was food that satisfied hunger but not much more.
I bought a bottle of water at the gas station a block away because I kept having the sensation that I had burned the inside of my mouth and realizing I didn’t — their sauce is crazy weird.
I will say the staff is much nicer than Golooney’s, so I give them that. The pizza’s different, and it’s not worse than Golooney’s, but it doesn’t earn my recommendation.
Red’s Savoy Uptown
2329 Hennepin Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55405
612-377-3110
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I agree that there’s something very interesting about the sauce at Red’s Savoy. But, having only been to the Saint Paul location once, I actually quite liked the overall experience.
The ambiance was so strange…we went in the middle of the afternoon and our eyes literally had to adjust to the dark, windowless space when we walked in. It was filled with interesting people and just felt like it didn’t even belong in Saint Paul. Maybe its eccentricities are what I liked about it