Rocky Rococo Pan Style Pizza

Stopped for dinner Monday night, after trying 2 other restaurants that were closed.
It was actually good! I say that because, it’s usually a doughy mess. Quite good this time, plenty of sauce.

When Rocky’s is good it is very good. However it is always a hit or miss. Today was the worst pizza I have ever had. The bread sticks were hard as croutons and my pizza was barely warmer than room temperature and looked as if it was made hours before. My husbands also was just as bad.

We picked up some pizza to go from Rocky’s on our way to House of Brews. The brewery, located a few minutes away by car, allows you to bring in your own food and it was a good excuse for us to revisit one of my childhood favorites.
Originally opened in Madison in the mid 70’s, the chain has a mascot who’s a reference to a character from the Firesign Theatre, a Los Angeles-​based comedy troupe know for surrealistic humor on live radio programs and recorded albums. The chain used to have restaurants all over the midwest, but now they’re almost exclusively found in Wisconsin. The pizzerias really focus on their eccentric mascot, who looks like a Panamanian tailor in a fedora or a WWII propaganda piece against Italians.
Stepping into Rocky’s is a 1990s time capsule. Little has changed with Rocky’s pizza in the past couple decades. They still have posters of Signor Rococo all over the place, they still sell square-​shaped, pan style pizza with their signature Italian-​spiced, meatball-​sized sausage (among other possible options, although I prefer their sausage pizza), and they still offer butter-​lathered breadsticks served in paper cups. It’s greasier than your average pizza and I don’t understand why they throw a sheet of plastic over it inside the box, but it tastes and smells just as I remember it from birthday parties and school events.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying Rocky’s pizza is extraordinary, but it’s definitely fun to revisit it and reenter an unchanged scene with all the same sights, smells and décor from 20 years ago.