Takeout Edition: Glass Nickel Pizza Co. - GB

When I included Glass Nickel Pizza Co. on my weekly restaurant updates, my husband mentioned a few days later he considered them to be the best pizza he’s had in town so far, excluding any pizzas from the major brewpubs. This was news to me. He never told me this! Prior to COVID-19, Glass Nickel had apparently been one of his office’s favorites to order as a treat to the crew, so with this knowledge, we ordered delivery from Glass Nickel on Sunday evening.

They’re clear with the expectations they have for achieving contactless carryout and delivery, and they give them to you in a big pop up box after your order online. This is just good business during the pandemic, and it’s something I can appreciate both as a person who hates the awkward exchange that comes with delivery anything and as a person in a global pandemic. They also have a texting system that informs you of when your order has been received and when it has left the building. Plenty of warning so you can get your pants back on before you have to get to the door.

In this house, we don’t eat red sauce pizza, or at least we don’t eat it when my husband is around. My husband has a lifetime dislike of any tomato based sauces, so we decide on pizza places based on what kind of white pizza we are able to get from each location. Glass Nickel is currently doing a promotion where they have staff created pizzas on the menu as a special, and one of those was the foodle noodle which spoke to us immediately.

​First, it was the Nacho cheese sauce. Boom, sauce requirement achieved. Then came the rest of the toppings: cavatappi noodles, their house blend cheese, bacon, chicken, and feta. When we came to the decision to order, we were just lamenting that Copperstate Brewing was closed because I really wanted their mac and beer cheese pizza. This was close enough!

The ten inch pizza we ordered was absolutely stuffed to the gills with the toppings called for by the Foodle Noodle. Some of the cavatappi noodles had crisped up under the heat of the pizza oven, and the three cheese blended together into a saucy bottom and stretchy top layer. I barely noticed the bacon through the strong flavors of the cheese sauce, but the texture of chicken can’t be missed. When we do some more exploration of the menu in the future (and if the Foodle Noodle remains on the menu), it may be the one we come back too. The Foodle Noodle is not the only pizza on the menu that is made with a different sauce than their house red, so the options remain wide open for us in the future.

I almost forgot about the crust! God, the crust! A nice, pillowy crust is all anyone can ever ask for from most pizza places, and Glass Nickel delivers pillowy edges with crispy bottoms all the way across the underside of the pizza. The weight of the toppings has little bearing on this if the Foodle Noodle is any indicator. They cook the crust to damn near perfection, and it was that way both in our actual pizza and in our cheese bread.

Key to any good pizza joint is a good sides menu. We ordered cheese bread as well as what they call Nickel Bites, fried sections of their pizza dough cut into tiny balls. The nickel bites were a unique menu item to me, so I waited for them with the most anticipation once our order went through online. We opened up the little box they came in, and I was not disappointed. 

It helps the cause of each of these side dishes that the side containers of marinara that can come with each side were delicious in every way. I’m not a fan of sweeter pizza sauces, so dunking those fried hunks of pizza dough into a zippy marinara was a welcome discovery. A good marinara alone is often enough for me to keep ordering pizza from a location, so good on Glass Nickel for this one. It’s the only way I can have red sauce with pizza so that I can accommodate my husband’s tomato hatred on whatever we share together.

Pizza is, of course, the ultimate delivery food, so there isn’t much to recount on how the food held up between the restaurant and my apartment. It was warm. The cheese stretched on the cheesesticks like it had just come out of the oven. There was absolutely nothing to complain about throughout the whole ordering and delivery process. They worked hard on getting it ready for service in the pandemic, and their online system showed that.

Glass Nickel rises in the ranks of local pizza joints for us to pull up in our browser when the lazy desire to stay on the couch after work rises up. It carried us through a session of Dungeons and Dragons, and I imagine it will get us through much more for the duration of our time as Wisconsinites. 

You can visit Glass Nickel Pizza Co. at their facebook page-- this one is for their Green Bay Location. They have locations throughout Wisconsin, which you can look at on their main website, https://www.glassnickelpizza.com/. They’ve started this really fun thing where they stream their pizza making over the course of an even at the Green Bay location. Might be a cool watch one evening if it comes back and you order!