Ben N.
Yelp
Scanning back through the first few years of my Yelp reviews--I've been around here since 2009--I can see that I didn't pull any punches when it came to Cincinnati pizza. Pretty sure that I dismissed Cincinnati as a "Pizza Wasteland" more than once.
I don't think I was wrong. At the end of "Goodfellas," Henry Hill complained about life as a witness-protection-program "schnook"; in his exile, he ordered spaghetti with marinara sauce and got "egg noodles with ketchup." Pizza in Cincinnati wasn't quite that awful, but underbaked, floppy, flavorless crust and under-seasoned too-sweet sauce were the norm back then and bad enough to at least remind me of the movie scene.
But as with some other food items and cuisines (think Mexican) in Cincinnati, things around here have picked up dramatically since that time with pizza.
Back during the warm weather months of 2020, when there was no COVID vaccine and social distancing was a serious matter, we simply weren't dining indoors at restaurants. Catch-a-Fire's pleasant patio put it in our regular rotation, and it has largely stayed there. The personal-sized pizzas were a great value then, and still are even after the recent inflation. More importantly, they're excellent: wood-firing at high temps results in crust with some crispness, toothsomeness, and flavor to it (usually some slight charring, which helps), and tomato sauce with easily more flair than the average. I'm not at all a vegetarian, but my preference with pizza is non-meat toppings. The "Natural Mystic" (the name of the restaurant comes from a Bob Marley album and most (all?) of the specialty pizzas are named after Marley songs) is a bit of a Margherita variation, with pesto added for additional boldness, and it is terrific.
Service is a little uneven, and I'm adjusting for the period when the pandemic was doing a number on restaurant staffing. At Catch-a-Fire, it's seemingly more of a management issue: on a couple of occasions, multiple staff members have been standing around the register doing nothing while a couple of servers are racing around trying to deal with too many tables. But individual servers have always been friendly and professional.
Also, as an old-man-in-training I've finally come to really like the music of Bob Marley. But you most likely won't hear it or anything like it in this restaurant: Instead, the sound system usually features some generic, safe electronic music that you might get at the Gap. Either that, or some undistinguished hippie-ish rock. The volume stays pretty low, though, and it's ultimately pretty harmless.
For whatever reason, the pizza at this Blue Ash location seems consistently better than that at the Madtree brewery where it was sold before this place opened. And the smaller pizzas seem better than the larger ones, which have had a bit of sogginess in the center once or twice.
Four-plus stars.
