Pizza Review: US Pizza & Grill vs Cousin Mike’s Pizza

US Pizza & Grill vs Cousin Mike’s Pizza – Summary

Best Cheese Pizza Today:

Out of the two cheese pizzas, US Pizza & Grill was the winner with 100% of the votes.

Taste test

Participants: 13
Date of tasting: 1/18/23

Average Ratings for Specialty Pizzas:

• Cousin Mike’s – Buffalo Chicken Pizza: 4.4
• US Pizza & Grill – Chicken Stir Fry Specialty Pizza: 6.7
• US Pizza & Grill – Margherita Pizza: 7

Cheese Pizzas: Comparing the two

Cousin Mike’s Cheese Pizza

The two cheese pizza today looked very similar.  They tasted very different though.

Mike’s didn’t do well again US Pizza.  In every category folks could think of they liked it less than US.

The dough was a little to airy and in all three main elements seemed to lack flavor.

I wouldn’t want a plain cheese from here again, but I would definitely get more of their specialty pies or other menu items.  (I was a fan of the buffalo chicken pizza — see more below on that).

One taster suggested that Mike’s pizza should be cooked longer to be a better contestant in the tasting, but I didn’t find it to be underdone.  To me it seemed the dough, cheese, and sauce were all lacking something.

US Pizza & Grill Large Cheese Pizza

It was a shutout.  100% of the 13 tasters went with the US Pizza and Grill.

Some quotes from the tasters:

“Fire.”
“What cheese pizza is supposed to taste like.”

I agree.  It was good.

It is still (I think) the greek-style crust that 90% of the pizza places in Fall River, but it really worked really well.

The Specialty Pizzas

The Buffalo Chicken Specialty Pizza from Cousin Mike’s

This pizza didn’t earn a high average score, but it earned a place with me personally because the chicken was good.

In many of the buffalo chicken pizzas the chicken is usually either too dry or of low quality.

While the crust at Mike’s isn’t what I’d turn to, the chicken was a really good fit and the pizza overall was great with some Ken’s blue cheese dressing.  

The pie itself didn’t come with blue cheese without asking.

Many people gave it in the 3-5 range for scores.  I gave it a 6.5 because I really like buffalo chicken.

Margherita Pizza from US Pizza and Grill

This pizza earned the star of the show.  Not everyone was a fan — mostly because of tomatoes (in general they didn’t like tomatoes, not because these tomatoes were bad).

Overall this was a very good pie.  The strongest critiques were the mild flavors of the pie.  The ingredients were definitely all of great quality, but the lack of fresh basil and maybe some other seasoning hurt the experience.

In a nutshell: a mildly-flavored pizza with high quality ingredients, that happens to be missnig a little zest.

Chicken Stir Fry Specialty Pizza from US Pizza and Grill

Not everyone likes mushrooms or olives or even veggies in general.

For those that did like those things, the toppings went extremely well together.

Some of the biggest critiques were the lack of any stir fry sort of seasoning.  Meaning: there definitely wasn’t any soy sauce used in frying up the toppings first.

Due to the high water element from the veggies, things were a big soggy too.

But again, a lot of folks liked it becuase it was something along the lines of the toppings they would get anyway and it really worked well.

Stir fry?  No.  There was no stirring of things being fried for this pizza and there were no asian sauces used in the construction.

Again — very quality ingredients for an overall good pizza.

Ordering Experience

I placed the order for US Pizza over the phone and used a credit card.

For Mike’s Pizza — they don’t do deliveries in-house so I used DoorDash.  (The options are DoorDash or GrubHub).

For the Mikes/Doordash order, they really didn’t give me a good window for the delivery time.  It was either 12:40-1 or 1-1:20.

I chose the 1-1:20 window, but it still arrived too early.

US Pizza and Grill showed up at 12:43pm.  17 minutes early.

The DoorDash order showed up at 12:47pm.  Not terrible but made me a little mistrustful of DoorDash’s order-ahead mechanism after setting the target window of 1-1:20pm.

Sizes and Pricing

Want to see more things pizza?

Check out the main pizza page to see all the tastings and info we've gathered.