Sbarro American Village

Sbarro is a relatively new addition to the restaurant scene in American Village. Located on the 2nd floor of the Carnival Park building (the one with the ferris wheel on top) it’s open from 11am to 11pm seven days a week.

When you walk in you’re greeted by a display cabinet with all the available fresh pizza on show. They had a variety of regular thin crust or NY style pizzas ranging from basics like cheese or mushroom through to more meaty combinations. Also available was the “Great America” Chicago deep dish pizza. Although not cheap at 780 yen a slice we thought we’d give it a go as it’s the first time we’ve seen Chicago style pizza in Okinawa.

Next along the counter from the pizza, where after ordering they heat it for you in a pizza oven, is a salad, pasta and wings station. When we visited they had decent sized NY meatballs as well as chicken wings and a variety of salad combinations. All looked very fresh. Salad is approximately 380 yen, you can also add a fountain drink onto your meal for 170 yen for a regular size. If you fancy a slightly stronger drink they had a variety of beers also available.

Everything was well presented and the staff spoke English, so no problems with ordering. Inside there are probably about 10-15 tables in sets of 2-3, so if it’s busy you may well end up sitting outside. There’s a nice balcony to watch the world of Chatan go by, but you may find it a bit hot, so if you don’t want to sit outside it may be worth checking for a table before you order.

So onto the pizza. The Chicago deep dish was advertised as “all meat” and true to it’s word it was pretty well stuffed with sausage, ham, bacon, and minced beef. However, although the taste was pretty good, we did find it a bit oily. We’re no experts on Chicago deep dish pizzas but according to the guru that is Wikipedia (Chicago Style Pizza) the traditional way of making this is to put a cheese layer at the bottom, with plenty of filling and then chopped tomato sauce on top. The Sbarro version was the right depth but instead of being more like a pie with an open top, it appeared to have pizza dough on top of the filling with that covered in cheese. We’re told that this can be a variation on Chicago pizza but we felt that it was maybe a bit too much dough, and it would have benefitted from being more traditional “Chicago style” by not having that top dough layer but also having more tomato instead of so much meat. A bit more tomato sauce would have balanced the meat more and not made it so fatty.

All in all, if you’re into pizza it’s worth a visit to try a new place, next time we’ll try one of the NY style pizzas to see how the dough and toppings stack up against some of the established pizza restaurants locally, like Pizza In. Weight in in the comments if you’ve had the NY style pizzas and let us know how you find them compared to the local established restaurants.