Uno Chicago Grill
4125 Maple Road, Amherst, NY 14226
Web: Uno Chicago Grill
Phone: 716.834.6200
Rating:    [learn more]
Pros:

Established chain restaurant with new emphasis on grilled fare and good desserts.

Cons:

Poor to okay meal quality, with extremely disappointing, sub-supermarket-quality deep dish pizzas now served in place of famed originals, and overpriced, mediocre salads and drinks.

See More Restaurant Reviews For:
Amherst Chicago Pizza

"We quickly realized that we would have been better off buying microwave pizzas from a supermarket; they come out crunchier, hotter, and more delicious, besides."

We won't waste much time or words discussing Uno Chicago Grill, once known as Pizzeria Uno, the chain that popularized the Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Years ago, we visited an Uno in a shopping mall somewhere, and after a forgettable meal had no desire to return again; only a suggestion to try something different led us back this week for our most recent and probably final Uno visit. This brief review, written as we're on a brief hiatus, covers just the basics - in short, it's fairly obvious why the restaurant no longer includes the word "pizzeria" in its name.

We were never really impressed by Pizzeria Uno's signature pizza when we first tried it 15 or 20 years ago, and were willing to write off the concept of deep dish pizza - a pie-like super thick crust with raised edges, topped with cheese and stuffed with sauce and ingredients - as yet another nothing special variant on the real thing. But a friend in Chicago told us in no uncertain terms that we needed to wipe our minds of that experience; we had tried deep dish pizza at the wrong place.

"But didn't Uno invent deep dish?" we asked. "Sort of," we were told, and then taken to Lou Malnati's restaurant in Chicago. It turns out that Lou's father Rudy invented the deep dish pizza while he worked for the original Pizzeria Uno, and while Uno made a national but mediocre franchise business out of the item, Lou used the recipe to create a superior but smaller local chain. The deep dish pizzas at Lou Malnati's turned out to be phenomenal - as good a representation of Chicago-style pizza as Bocce's are of Buffalo-style pizza. Like Bocce's, they ship nationally, and we've actually had a few of their dry iced pies, which aren't bad. To get the real thing, you need to visit Malnati's, and prepare to be impressed.

Uno's, on the other hand, remains as bad today as it was a dozen or more years ago. You'll note that this review doesn't have our normal "highs," "lows," and other segments; that's because there weren't any highs to speak of at Uno - for starters, the pizzas we ordered were pretty close to miserable. We tried two on our visit, one the "Numero Uno" ($10) and the other vegetarian ($8.50), the former described as offering "sausage, pepperoni, onions, peppers, mushrooms" along with sauce, mozzarella, and romano cheeses. The latter was supposed to contain a wide variety of vegetables, plus the same chunky tomato sauce and cheeses, adding feta.

As weird as this might sound, the pizzas tasted a little different from one another, due solely to the addition of feta to the vegetarian one, but we couldn't actually discern any of the flavors save for sauce, cheese, and dough, or find most of the listed ingredients inside the pieces we were eating. This was odd in that the pizzas' descriptions would have suggested strongly different tastes and looks, but they both tasted similar: soggy, bland, and almost entirely unlike the real deep dish pizzas we've had elsewhere. We quickly realized that we would have been better off buying microwave pizzas from a supermarket; they come out crunchier, hotter, and more delicious, besides.

Other items we ordered, including a Lettuce Wrap special ($9.49), were similarly unimpressive. Lettuce Wraps at some restaurants, notably The Cheesecake Factory, are phenomenal, loaded with delicious chicken and wonderful sauce options, while at places like Chili's, ground bits of meat and other plain items on the plate make the Thai-inspired dish forgettable. Uno's version was just bland. The meat and vegetables were all but flavorless, and the lettuce leaves were on the rough side, torn with little concern about easily assembling the wraps. On the plus side, the included amateur-quality Thai peanut sauce was at least strong enough to make the wraps edible; the dish was missing a vinaigrette described on the menu, but it didn't seem to matter.

Several salads, ranging from the Gorgonzola Walnut Salad ($4.29) to Asian Chicken ($9.49) and Spinach and Chicken Salads ($9.79), were similarly not very good, while a cucumber-loaded "Southside Lemonade" with lemonade, gin, and mint, at first seemed refreshingly cool, but revealed little alcohol and flavor. From item to item, it was hard to feel like there was real value in what was being served.

Our group also ordered two desserts at $5 each, the so-called "All American" apple crisp, and the Uno Deep Dish Sundae, the latter more out of a sense of completing our look at this place's deep dish offerings than any confidence that it would be good. While the apple crisp was found immediately to be lacking in crispness - no shock given our pizza experiences - but otherwise good, the Deep Dish Sundae was as described, an oversized chocolate chip cookie cooked in a metal pie pan, then served with ice cream and chocolate sauce. Amazingly, it was actually pretty good, slightly crunchy on the bottom and large enough for several people to share, though one person commented that $5 for a cookie and ice cream wasn't exactly a good deal.

Given the current $6-$7 prices of similar-sized desserts at other places, that sentiment was more a reflection of the mood that developed during a long, uninspired dinner than anything inherently wrong with this item. Most of the other dishes had been so disappointing that it was hard to feel as if the roughly $20 per person meal had been worth it, though one person at the table enjoyed an $11 Rosemary Chicken entree she ordered, and of course, the "new" menu emphasizes lots of grilled items these days. Based on what we've tried, we wouldn't recommend or ourselves revisit this restaurant, but for those who view Applebee's as a treat or lament the loss of the area's nearby Bennigan's, Uno's menu and quality may seem like a par choice, or perhaps on the right day even a step up from the norm. Our advice would be to keep on driving; better dining can't possibly be that far away.