Shark Bite: Reviews of Volta, TriBecca Allie Pizza

By Wes Brown, Charles Matranga
Hottytoddy.com contributors
sharkbiteoxford@gmail.com

TriBecca Allie
Overall: 8.5
Price: $13.50 for a large pizza

After getting such a high volume of feedback from our readers, we decided to take a trip to TriBecca Allie. We normally decide to review pizza when we’re on the brink of starvation, and this review was no different. What we didn’t know is that TriBecca Allie is in Sardis, which is over half an hour away.

Sardis is a small, rural town that makes Mayberry look like Midtown Manhattan. TriBecca Allie is located on Main Street, a narrow road where you’d expect to find two guys having a gun duel at high noon after one of them called the other a “yellow belly.” But what Sardis lacks in skyscrapers, traffic lights, and running water, it makes up for it with hospitality and delicious pizza.

A half cheese, half pepperoni pizza from TriBecca Allie in Sardis. Photo by Wesley Brown.

TriBecca Allie’s dough was exactly what we have been looking for. The dough itself had an incredible taste, with enough crisp to keep you interested. The SharkBite crew may be the first group of people to contemplate ordering pizza dough with no ingredients on it whatsoever. The cheese was top-tier and had great consistency. Like most places, the sauce was good but clearly not the focal point of our dining experience.

Considering all the hype, the pepperoni was lackluster. In all fairness, eating pepperoni isn’t normally a life-changing experience, but TriBecca Allie seems to specialize in gourmet ingredients so the average flavor was a bit of a letdown. Disappointment due to high expectations is an unfortunate pitfall for those hyped up to be the best pizza in Mississippi.

The staff of TriBecca Allie is strictly business. Usually, when you tell the owner of a restaurant that you’re going to rate their food and publish it to the internet, it causes nerves to flare up. The owner of TriBecca Allie was unphased. Later we found out that he makes pizza that has gained national recognition. Particularly, the “Magnolia Rosa Ensalada,” a pizza with a salad on top, was the runner up in the American Pizza Championship. If any pizza championships out there are looking for two self-identified pizza experts, we’re free next Wednesday afternoon.

Volta
Overall: 4.9
Price: $10.63 for a personal pizza

Michael Scott once posed the question: “Would you rather have a medium amount of good pizza, or all you can eat of pretty good pizza?” It’s a fair question that balances the pizza virtues of taste and hunger satisfaction. Our trip to Volta conjured a nightmare third scenario where you are served a minuscule amount of pretty bad pizza.

A half cheese, half pepperoni pizza from Volta Taverna. Photo by Wesley Brown. 

The dough was soft and chewy, but easy to handle solely because each slice was the size of a pita chip. The cheese tasted like someone tried to explain what cheese is supposed to taste like to someone who had never eaten it before. You could tell what it was supposed to be, but it clearly fell short. The pepperoni was nothing special, which is probably for the best. It’s a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention to waste high-quality pepperoni on what Kevin Malone would succinctly describe as “a hot circle of garbage.”

To be fair, Volta is not known for its pizza, much like El Agave is not known for its Buffalo wings. Volta certainly serves other fantastic food worth ordering, but the fact that they have pizza on their menu demands an honest review, and writing honest reviews is what we do best. To put it simply, Volta’s pizza is a $10 kids’ meal you don’t have to be under 12 to order. This pizza also gave us such strong school cafeteria vibes that we accidentally told the server our eighth-grade lunch numbers instead of giving her our debit cards when the bill came.

Much like pet rocks and Fiji water, we are baffled that people actually pay for Volta plain cheese pizza. But like Proud Larry’s “Fat Larry” specialty meat pizza, “the Volta” offers a glimmer of hope for true pizza enthusiasts. Topped with sausage, pepperoni, onions, and green peppers, this pizza at least made an attempt to justify its Ivy League price tag.

Ultimately, this pizza exists only for those occasions where you’re craving a mouth-watering lamb and beef gyro doused in tzatziki sauce, but your kid is on a strict self-imposed diet of pizza and legos. SharkBite is a fan of silver linings, so the fact that Volta’s menu has something for the whole family is a plus in our book.