Attended their woodfire pizza class at Olio2go. While the host (Chef Cole) seems like a nice guy, this experience was a fail on almost every level. Perhaps with some additional thought they will be able to improve their execution.
Positives:
1. PIzza came out of the oven looking nice.
Areas for improvement:
1. This was advertised as a pizza class. There was no demonstration of how to make dough. The only discussion about dough was "put 62% of water in whatever flour you use. And use 0 or 00." Nothing about kneading, typical proportions, etc.
2. They oversold the class for the available space and seating.
3. The class was scheduled to begin at 6pm. We arrived at 5:50pm and the class had already begun and no seats were left (keep in mind that everyone had pre-registered). A guest who arrived at 5:55pm was noticeably concerned that she was late and asked several people what she had missed.
4. They had 2 pizza ovens for the 14 or 16 people who were there. There was one instructor. Because the instructor both had to make the pizzas with the attendees as well as cook the pizzas, that meant that the ovens were dead when he was putting toppings on pizza or the pizza-making station was dead when he was at the oven. The result was that it took over 90 minutes (from the end of the "class" portion, which was only 30 minutes) to cook the pizzas. By the time we decided to leave at 8:15pm, there were still 3 people who'd had no food.
5. They decided the order of cooking by raffle, which prohibited people who were a group from eating together.
6. As noted above, the pizzas (for those who got them) looked great when they came out of the oven. However, I didn't hear a single person talk about the taste, just the appearance. I was wondering why (because I was one of those who didn't get to eat and gave up after 90 minutes of standing around doing nothing), but I found out when we left. My wife' s pizza was so overwhelmed by the taste of burned wood that she couldn't eat it and took it home to throw out. An hour later, she is still talking about the firewood taste in her month (and not in a good way).
Perhaps the chef knows what he's doing, perhaps not. It was hard to tell. But I have to wonder about the choice to have only 2 ovens and 1 instructor for a class that size, as well as the choice of oven (or wood, or both) that would create a woodfired crust that tasted more like a house fire than a pizza.