Coupon Fail and Fatte's Pizza

This weekend, we tried to used our La Querencia coupon...

but the parking totally sucked. It's on a busy stretch of Broadway in west Chula Vista. Their lot only holds four cars and street parking was full, so...

we drove up a bit and made a U-turn. Off we went to find another spot for lunch.

But we did not eat here at Pho Royal, which was supposed to be called "What the Pho" (as seen in signs last year before they opened). This is the location of the former Tango Grill (an Argentinian place) which morphed into a Mexican then Mediterranean, followed by Pho 888 (which sadly folded about two years ago)...

$4.95 for a bowl of pho? I wonder how good (or bad) it could be. But today was not the day to find out...

I had another coupon in the Chula Vista area...one for a place called Nuevo Vallarta Nayarit, also farther down on Broadway.

Wouldn't you know it? Nuevo Vallarta Nayarit is no longer. It's now "Asi es Jalisco", a place that is at the opposite end of the same building that houses "Aqui es Texcoco". I wonder if they are the same owners? The names of the restaurants are similar, "Here is Texcoco" and "There is Jalisco" (which specializes in birria)...There was also no parking in this lot and the line at Texcoco was out the door, which wasn't surprising since it was a weekend.

As a last resort and also because TC wanted pizza, I dug up one last coupon which was closer to our neck of the woods, Fatte's Pizza, located in the small strip mall on the corner of Otay Lakes Road and East "H" Street. It's next to Rice King (yuk) and Valerio's Bakery (no longer owned by the Valerio's but the name is still there).

Turns out they have a special on pizza everyday. Buy one get one free, any size. So the coupon was just an ad to get people through the door, according to the worker. Oh, we forgot to ask about "The Dude" (a "Big Lebowski" reference, I'm sure)...

We got the Large Fatte's Special and one Large Deluxe Hawaiian.

Their logo. Looks like they are a chain from the central coast with three San Diego locations.

We took the pizzas to go. That's Bert in what I call his "Sam Merlotte" shirt (in SDSU colors). He just needs a big ass belt buckle to go with that shirt.

The Fatte's special which had everything under the sun on top of it. In retrospect, this wasn't such a good thing. The pizza had so many toppings that it became soggy. I liked the vegetables and the linguica but the pineapple bothered me on this one (but not on the Hawaiian one). The crust wasn't so good either. It couldn't stand up to the weight of the toppings. We had our neighbor and her girls over for lunch as well. They enjoyed the pizzas; the girls liked this more than I did.

This was the Deluxe Hawaiian - much better than the "special" since the toppings weren't overly done. Plus there was a bit of crust on the edge and it wasn't soggy or greasy.

I had a packet of this instand Hawaiian Sun passion fruit drink. It's one packet for one quart but I ended up diluting it with another quart of water in the pitcher. Got the drink mix from Marukai Living in the small Hawaiian foods section, where you can also buy different permutations of SPAM, like Bacon, Hickory Smoked, and Spicy.

Our fancy square paper plates and my amber faceted thrift store goblet...

I really liked the smoky linguica on this. We weren't expecting to see linguica on a pizza along with pepperoni and sausage!

If we do go here again, we want to their Garlic Chicken pizza...