Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Restaurant review

Time to fill up? Heeere's Johnny's!

Down - home food, slim prices and a menu that goes from meatloaf to souvlaki refuel the hungry in a former garage.

By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published November 23, 2006

Johnny’s Pizza & Restaurant opened in St. Petersburg in 1993. In its previous life, it was a gas station and convenience store.
	[Times photo: Atoyia Deans]

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Atoyia Deans] A cheesesteak with french fries has company both all-American and ethnic on Johnny’s Pizza & Restaurant’s four-page menu.

ST. PETERSBURG

It's hard to select one lovely gem from Johnny's four pages of treasures.

Tapioca, those funny chewable bubbles? My first butterscotch pudding since childhood?

Cheesesteaks, meatloaf sandwiches, extra-thick French toast, ham steak, liver and onions and beautiful pizzas?

There's just so much to love at this former gas station. From Italy, eggplant parm, meatballs and garlic knots. From Greece, souvlaki, spanakopita and Greek salads of the potato kind and a horiatki with cucumber. Feta, olives and anchovies (hurray).

Then there are the specials, 10 blue plates a day: Swiss steak, lasagna, beef tips on noodles, and so on. And it all comes, with soup or salad and dessert, for less than $10.

I'm skeptical of such a long menu at any restaurant, much less one that tore out its gas pumps just three years ago.

But no worries. Remarkably, Johnny's Pizza & Restaurant (nee Amoco) can cook them all.

It's hard to choose the best aspect of Johnny's: comforting soup bowls spilling over with noodles or the camaraderie of diners and servers who work hard and laugh harder. Or tiny prices for big food, like $1.75 for a two-fried-egg sandwich or a $6.95 dinner of beef tips noodles and trimmings or an $8.95 New York strip.

I say it's the cooking here, the physical technique and mental savvy, that counts more than clever collages of pricey ingredients du jour.

There's no French goat cheese, just feta and ricotta, which some higher-priced Italian places lack. Have 'em both on a white pizza with spinach and a mosaic of tomato slices.

It feels like a diner, but this isn't short-order: pizza dough rose today, chicken was fried to order, the peppers stuffed by hand, stocks built in-house.

The breakfasts and sandwiches are almost artisanal, handmade, fresh and generous. Eggs come more than 40 ways (try a gyro omelet). The sandwich board is endless: hoagies, subs, reubens, melts, triple-decker clubs and grinders.

My fish sandwich was flaky, crusty, fresh from the fryer and bigger than bun or plate.

Oldies are the main course, but originality does pop out: a pumpkin stuffed with rice and vegetables for Halloween; butter-garlic shrimp; and a wickedly inventive Monte Cristo for breakfast: French toast with turkey, ham and swiss.

Seek such care in $30 entrees in a retro-deco bistro if you want. I found it on a modest corner packed with so many pickups it still looks like a gas station.

The cooking is honest and energetic, proof that the human ingredient is the most important. In this case, it's John and Stella Maganiaris and a busy kitchen crew.

Today we should thank them and good cooks everywhere.

Chris Sherman dines anonymously and unannounced. The St. Petersburg Times pays for all expenses. A restaurant's advertising has nothing to do with selection for review or assessment of its quality. Sherman can be reached at (727) 893-8585 or sherman@sptimes.com

Review

Johnny's Pizza & Restaurant

3001 28th St. N, St. Petersburg

727 323-3919

Hours: 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, Saturday; 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday.

Details: Credit cards accepted, no reservations, no beer or wine. Outdoor deck, catering, delivery and carryout.

Prices: Breakfast, $1.75 to $8.25; lunch and dinner, $2.95 to $9.95; pizza, $4.75 to $18.45.

[Last modified November 22, 2006, 11:20:46]