From Deep Dish to Tavern Style Pizza and Calzones, Rotolo's Menu Goes Big

Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based Rotolo’s Craft & Crust offers a bit of everything for pizza fans. From Chicago deep dish to tavern style and Detroit style, all with a side of Mardi Gras whimsy, you'll need to make a lot of trips to cover it all. Even the cheese sticks are worthy of a personal consultation.

This spot in Frisco, off the Dallas North Tollway just north of Main Street, isn’t upscale by any means. The decor is rustic with scratched-up wooden tables and unfinished brick walls. A bar is tucked away in one corner and a sign that reads “pizza for the people” hovers in another. They’re not lying. The menu is full of different styles of pizza for all manner of consumers: the airy-thin-crust lovers, the Detroit-style fans and, of course, the classic deep-dish zealots. While we bucket ourselves into the latter, we’ll be back to try the rest.
Start with an order of Rotolo's Famous Cheese Sticks ($11). The name is self-aggrandizing, we admit, but it only took one bite for us to understand the hype. The first surprise is the sheer size. At 10 inches in diameter, the extra-large slices give the dish an almost intimidating presence as it’s offloaded onto your table. We got the original style (cheese), but next time will try the Chalmette style with hot sauce, garlic butter, feta, cheddar, mozzarella, Parmesan and marinara for dipping.

If you thought the cheese sticks were this place’s claim to fame, wait until the pizza rolls in. The deep dish is delivered to the table in a sizzling hot skillet. A pound of melted cheese and Rotolo’s crushed tomato sauce is held together with an ultra-flaky deep-dish crust. Options like the Windy City ($25) and the Big Apple ($27) are stuffed with pepperoni, sausage and pesto sauce. The pizza takes about 30 minutes to bake and arrive at the table. But our verdict is that the authentic, fresh-baked deep dish is worth the occasional pangs of hunger while you wait.
Our appetites weren’t big enough to make it to the rest of the menu. Different flavors of wings, pastas and sandwich melts add more variety to the selections. Even pizza options venture beyond the deep-dish, with options like the cracker-thin, original-thick, and a newly added Detroit-style crust. It’ll take at least two or three (hungry) trips here to sample everything

However, we couldn't pass on the bread pudding bites from the Louisiana-based restaurant. Flash-fried cubes of sweet bread are covered with a vanilla bean mousse, caramel and vanilla syrup. We had just enough room to finish these off.

Rotolo's Craft & Crust, 9250 Dallas Parkway, Frisco. Sunday – Wednesday, 11 a.m. – 9 p.m.; Thursday – Saturday, 11 a.m. – 10 p.m.