Sauce on the Side, located downtown at 903 Pine St., doesn’t skimp on anything. Its calzones require two hands, a healthy appetite and a long walk to your next destination. While plenty of the restaurant’s Italian hot pockets are stuffed with meaty goodness, veg-heads hardly have to go hungry. The Magic Carpet Ride could easily feed two – but that means you’d have to share.
The Magic Carpet Ride showcases a generous handful of meaty button, crimini, shiitake and portabella mushrooms, made headier with the scent of sauteed garlic. The intense fungi flavors mellow when mixed with three oozing white cheeses, and the whole shebang is sealed in a tender dough pocket that’s just strong enough to take the weight of this behemoth. Then SOS gilds the lily, painting the top with garlic honey oil and, yes, even more shredded Parmesan. The calzone arrives with an eponymous sauce on the side, in this case garlic butter oil, a taste that lingers long after the calzone (and any hope of productivity later that day) is gone.
This article appears in August 2013.