Anyone here try Frisco's Pizza in New Haven?
On Forbes Avenue.
Yes only once. Decent but nothing special.
@imno1 's response reads like one step behind the, "Good, but not great" answer that often sounds like 'damning with faint praise,' and thus far I'd concur.
I probably do the place no favor by saying that I don't remember if I've been there twice or three times, or if I've had the pizza once or twice, but that's more a function of when I showed up and what I was looking for. Ultimately, I've added it up to my having bookmarked it for a future visit to see if I see if the love it gets on a New Haven Abeetz FB page meets up with my speculation.
For certain, my first visit was an empty trip. It was pure recon, on my way back to Westville from yoga at Cosey Beach in New Haven, a Saturday around noon. I'd read some enthusiastic posts and had never heard of it, and I was intrigued that the Gavones were pretty up on it.
Others mentioned it as a rare source of New Haven-worthy slices, so that's what I'd stopped in for. Turned out that slices were strictly a weekday lunchtime thing, which was disappointing but fair enough. I'd made a passing-by look-see not a pilgrimage.
Pretty sure I got a "decent but not special" slice the next time I tried when it was next in my path, probably heading back from Lighthouse Point after the Townsend Avenue Fire & Slice combination pizza & BBQ joint had failed as a business (and given me hellacious heartburn when I thought a smoked brisket-topped pizza warranted a try).
I decided that I wouldn't be able make a good assessment based on slices, just as I'd been underwhelmed when I once got a takeout slice from BAR, though that was after decades of sit-down pies. There's a reason why the best New Haven places only rarely do slices, something that's far better as a New York thing (note East Harlem Patsy's mentioned a few posts up for coal-fired oven slices that are worth more than the Triboro Bridge toll you can swap outup if it's not necessary to get immediately onto Bruckner when exiting Manhattan).
On a sunny day a couple years ago when freedom-loving bikers converged from throughout CT, metro NYC, and
southern New England swatm their loud pipes, burn rubber, do wheelie & other tricks on under-policed streets and Long Wharf's terminal market parking lot, big hogs, Japanese death devices, fancy reverse 3-wheelers, and swarms of unregistered dirt bikes were massed throughout the harbor's coastal paved perimeter in defiance of an on again-off again canceled permit for a major meet-up day. One such gathering point was the Gulf(?) gas station at the top of Forbes Ave, which was encroaching on Frisco's small adjacent parking lot and disruptive to a normal business day. The bikers and the pizza guys were at odds with each other but both friendly in their own way toward me in my Prius, and that's where I can't recall if I bailed with or without another slice (which may have been available at the counter) once I decided not to stick around the tense scene for a whole pie.
As such, Frisco's gets an incomplete grade. However, I continue to see swells of enthusiastic support within, "Who's your go-to?" FB posts. In tone, they remind me of Ernie's love that comes out of Westville where I used to live, and in the case of Ernie's I totally get it...but didn't before I lived there.
I'm thinking that Frisco's is the loyally-chosen, favored takeout choice for those living on the east side of the Q Bridge, including The Annex through Morris Cove and adjacent to Tweed Airport. It's convenient, nearby, steady, reliable, untouristed, pizza that'd be among my top choices if it were in Louisville, where pizza doesn't totally suck, but clearly is not New Haven, Connecticut, or New York.
Ernie's I have come to love, because each pie is made by Pat, son of the namesake. He more often than not has no problem starting a pie at 9:55, when closing time is 10. Or making 4 quarters of the pie differently, and marking the box on top as though it's a map, when I'm indecicisive. Pat is making and baking my pie, and it's not a bother, unless it's a setting where I read the room and the ask would bother me. These places are treasures, especially if you live where they don't exist.
I'd like to learn if Frisco's fits here, but from 850 miles away, it might not happen.
Frisco's holds similar, "I know these guys" energy. I've felt it at the Shoreline Grands, Letizia's, Mike's, Michelangelo, Rossini's, and suspect it's at North Branford's Bobby's which didn't Wow me as I'd gone in search of, but, like all listed, are really quite real if not legendary. I've heard similarly about, I think, Maria's in North Haven,