Need Pizzeria & Craft Beer Bar - Cedar Rapids, IA

It's pizza . . . 

I'm not sure really what to make of the Need Pizza.  Pizza was ok, but for a place that kept popping up as one of "the" places to go in Cedar No Rapids, that was one of the recommendations for the people we met up with, there was nothing special about the food or the location.  The non-descript frontage of the restaurant is severely understated, with a basic plain Need Pizza sign.  The back seating area is blah kind of a shoehorned afterthought.  And the menu is . . . I don't want to say lazy . . . but there's zero creativity in the appetizers, and the ONE set pizza is the Specialty Pie of the day.  The rest are only Build Your Own.  I can't say I've ever been in a pizza place that didn't have set pizzas

I was going to say we ordered more White Bread than I typically would, but frankly there weren't places to take risks.  The only apps were Garlic Cheese Bread with pizza sauce, Beef Meatballs with pizza sauce, Bread Stick Bites with pizza sauce (the animals dug in before I snapped a pic), and Queso Dip with bag tortilla chips (a notch above stadium nachos).  Wild.

They flexed a little in the salads, but not much.  The one salad that was orderd looked nice and fresh, though.  And it was ginormous

The pizza was good.  Solid.  Nothing special though.  Normally I'd crop the pizza pics above, but I left them as is to show how ridiculously large the pans were that they were served on.  We had tables pulled together for seven of us, and they covered nearly the entire area.  Ludicrous and annoying  

Maybe because I'd gotten the impressing the place was hip and cool, I expected someplace more fringe.  Or fringe at all, frankly.  Nothing interesting in the appetizers, salads typical, and nothing unusual in the available pizza toppings other than mashed potatoes (Wha?).  I can't say there was anything about the food that would get me to drive into downtown and pay for parking vs a local pizza joint.  If we were already downtown, I wouldn't be opposed to going back if I lived in Cedar No Rapids

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Need Pizzeria & Craft Beer Bar - 207 2nd Ave SE, Cedar Rapids, IA 52401

319-362-6333

IG #needpizzacr