First Class PIzza Lives Up to its Name

So we cheated a bit for this week's Fountain Valley Foodie, forsaking Urbanspoon's random pick in favor of trying out the recectly opened Fountain Valley location of First Class Pizza. And if we'd ever given any thought to being on a diet, First Class's gourmet pie is a more-than-worthy reason for cheating on that as well.

First thing's first: The service at First Class is, well, first class. We arrived for a late lunch sometime around 3, and were greeted like royalty by the genuinely enthusiastic crew. First Class offers a daily lunch special—a slice of pizza, a salad and a drink for $6.99—so we opted for that, given that we were dining solo. We're pizza purists, but we wanted to see if First Class could stand out from the crowd, so  we opted for the barbecue chicken pizza. In short, this pizza delivered.

We've been plenty of places where there's no way to tell how long that slice has been sitting around before someone nuked it, slapped it on a plate and expected us to love it. But even at the tail end lunch time (more on this later), the pizza tasted as if fresh from some sort of magic pizza re-animating oven. The crust was soft and tasty, and the barbecue sauce was sinfully sweet and tangy. But it was the fresh toppings that really made this pizza sing: mounds of tender chicken, red onion and fresh cilantro, with just enough roasted garlic to bring it all together.

The salad was fairly pedestrian, though more than passable as an accompaniment to the pizza. Not that we had any room for salad—because it was nearing the end of lunch hours, we were given a bonus slice of pie on the house and waddled away very full and very happy.

First Class Pizza also offers an assortment of pasta dishes and sandwiches as well as beer and wine in a very inviting setting with plenty of comfy booths, flat-screen TVs and sports memorabilia.