Rating: Once was enough
Tank's Pizza started out in 2011 across from the gates of Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston before moving a mile south down North New Braunfels Avenue to its current spot in 2018.
It's a no-frills place, painted red outside, with shiny corrugated steel wainscoting inside, stone floors and loud TVs competing for attention. A rotating stone deck oven turns out pizzas with thick-collared crusts that hold strong all the way to the pointed ends.
The crust is the best part, crispy and chewy with a flavor like garlic bread. But the crust isn't enough to bring me back for average pizza in a below-average setting.
Best pizza: Sometimes simple is better, and there's a reason pepperoni is the single most popular pizza in the country. That's true at Tank's, where the garlicky crust balances with mild pepperoni over a thick blanket of mozzarella and a sweet tomato sauce like mom's spaghetti ($10.99 medium).
Other pizzas: As Tank's ramped up the ingredients, the quality went down. That's counter-intuitive, but rubbery bacon on the Max Out Meat pizza ($16.99 medium) was compounded by dry and rangy beef and sausage, detracting from decent pepperoni and ham.
If you like bell peppers, you'll like Tank's Fresh from the Garden pizza ($16.99 medium). But they drowned out everything else, leaving the spinach, mushrooms, tomatoes and olives to fend for themselves.
All of those pizzas eventually showed up on a sad buffet, which runs from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays. It only costs $8.99, and the pizza disappeared about as fast as it showed up, leaving a calzone cut into messy strips and an oddball s'mores pizza with chocolate, marshmallows and cinnamon that tasted better than it sounds.
Skip the gummy fettuccine Alfredo and sticky spaghetti and wait for something fresh to show up on the warming table.
Mike Sutter is a food and drink reporter and restaurant critic in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | msutter@express-news.net | Twitter: @fedmanwalking