Papa Nicks

Review by Joel Kirk

11534 Clifton Boulevard
Cleveland, OH 44102-1318
(216) 281-9191

The Atmosphere

Mom and Pop Pizza Shop. Family dining room. When you walk into Papa Nicks, you’re immediately taken into a comfortable feeling of familiarity. For a small pizza place, Papa Nicks has a lot of tables inside of it, giving you plenty of places to sit. They also have a patio outside to help with some of the traffic overflow that happens here some days. There’s pictures of Cleveland on the walls, giving this place a good local feel. The kitchen is open to the dining room so you can see the kitchen staff working back there, working hard for your dining pleasure. This adds to the quaint ambiance of the place…really making it feel like you’re at home cooking with Mom in the kitchen.

The Menu

Papa Nicks has a variety of pizzas, sandwiches, salads and entrees on their menu. They have your basic build your own pizzas as well as specialty pizzas that you can order. Another nice thing about Papa Nicks is they have a real good beer selection for a smaller place. Good beers too. Not just your cheap light domestics but they have some better imports (Stella, Peroni, etc) available for consumption. One thing noticed was a sign for a 2-7 happy hour Monday-Friday where they have $2 Labatt. That could definitely be worth checking out!

The Food

I started with a dinner salad. It’s a good salad that comes with cheese and pepperoni and I highly recommend starting your meal with one of these. We started with the Appetizer Sampler, which consisted of Mozz. Sticks, Hot Wings and Zucchini Planks. They usually have Chicken Tenders as well on the combo platter but were out of them on our visit.

The best part of this platter were the Zucchini Planks. They were perfectly fried and served with ranch dressing for dipping. Very good appetizer. The hot wings were pretty good, though we only got Medium. I would have liked to try the Hot wings but one of our party has a bit of a weak tummy to Hot sauce.

For our main dish, we split a Large Pepperoni (8-slice). I’m a big fan of the pizza sauce at Papa Nicks. It’s got a great pepper taste along with the tomatoes and is definitely not an after thought. Also, the dough they use is good and makes for a great crust. I was a bigger fan of the pizza than Chris was but the other person in our party said that he liked the pizza and would go back again.

Departing

Papa Nicks is a good quick place to grab lunch. Takes about 10-15 minutes to get your pizza, I’d assume it takes around that long to get some of the entrees as well if you go at lunch. They take credit cards for easy payment and get you in and out pretty quickly. It’s a quick shot from downtown down the shore way. Parking in the back can get a little rough some days but there is also street parking. I will definitely be back to visit Papa Nicks for some more good family Italian food in the near future.

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