Zaa! simply Unique Pizza

Went to check out this place after getting an awesome groupon for $ 18– got a large pizza and antipasto salad. And by large, I mean HUGE — it fed 4 adults who were starv

Their pizza buffet is very good, with a nice selection of thin-​crust pizza, bread, and a fresh salad bar. I believe that they’ve closed effective 2÷13÷12 though.

In lieu of breakfast this past Thursday, I met my friends at Zaa! for their pizza lunch buffet. My friends had previously visited and raved about it, liking it to Farmington Hills’ Tomatoes Apizza, so I was naturally curious and eager to try it myself.
Zaa! is nestled in a shopping plaza on Livernois with Kroger, and a UPS store, and the Chinese restaurant that used to be Kublai Khan. Walking in, you’ll find a clean narrow dining room featuring faux Picasso pizza paintings, lava lamps, and a novelty slice clinging to the counter – rumor has it the slice likes to travel around the dining room. I totally believe it. When we arrived, about 1:00 p.m. the restaurant was empty, which made me a little nervous about the pizza sitting there, waiting to be eaten. Thankfully when we paid for our meals, the cashier asked us what we wanted so he could get some hot pies ready.
While waiting for the fresh pizza, we helped ourselves to fountain drinks (Coke products) and the salad bar. I will say their salad bar was delightful – a healthy bowl of Romaine, cucumbers, chick peas, feta and more! There were 4 dressings: balsamic, Italian, Italian #2, and America’s crack, Ranch. Probably within ten minutes the pizzas we requested appeared the «Popeye» with spinach and garlic and magic and the «Progressive» bedecked with spinach, artichoke hearts, garlic, basil, and tomatoes (though they left them off half for me, which really made it more like the Popeye plus artichokes). The pizzas were delicious! Perfectly crisp crust with fresh toppings and loaded with flavor.
Halfway through the meal I mentioned that I wished they had a cheese bread and my friends were like there’s totally breadsticks at the end of the buffet. I looked again and realized what I thought were the chocolate Nutella desserty things were actually really hard garlic sticks. So not dessert. The cashier guy did get me a cup pizza sauce which I thought might help with the kind of bland garlic bread, but to me the pizza sauce was oddly kind of bland? I could also taste tomato, which may sound crazy, but raw tomato is so not my thing, much like throwing the old pig skin around or volunteering for vacation bible school. The pizza’s fabulousness totally eclipsed the blah bread and weird sauce.
I will totally return to Zaa for it’s cheap lunch eating and most definitely for their dinner buffet which includes pizza, pasta, and dessert – real dessert – I think? If you find yourself in Rochester and are looking for a good meal on a small budget Zaa might just rock your world. And you can hunt for that traveling plastic pizza slice.

This place is definitely one of the best pizza joints in town. The lunch buffet is an amazing deal, and the pizza is truly remarkable. If you are a fan of thin crust pizza, this is the place for you! The unique menu, friendly service and endless pizza are all well worth it… when was the last time you had all you can eat pizza for $ 5!

$ 5 lunch buffet. Need I say more? If you go early or late, there will only be a few pizzas. Around noon is best. The garlic pasta and bread are awesome. But dont plan on kissing anyone for a good 24 hours after.
The salad on the buffet has a great selection of fresh toppings and dressings. Heck, I would pay $ 5 for the salad alone.

Best garlic bread I have ever had. Period.
Lunch buffet RULES here, there pizza is delicious and how can you beat $ 5?
$ 5 footlong, $ 5 hot and ready, or $ 5 ALL YOU CAN EAT DELICIOUSNESS?
Zaa FTW

We went in the middle of the week for the lunch buffet. We got there around 1pm and the place was empty. The food on the buffet had obviously been there a while, was dried out and/​or congealed. There were 5 or 6 pizzas on the buffet, but only 2 or 3 flavors to choose from. The salad bar was so-​so. Very limited seating and blah décor. The one plus was that the service was great and the staff was really friendly. I won’t be going back though. I can get better value for my money elsewhere.

My wife and I went here with my parents because we had a coupon. We were a little concerned at first because the only other review was 3 stars, though if you read it, it’s actually quite positive. We shared bread sticks, antipasto salad, and two pizzas: the progressive and the que, which is a barbecue chicken pizza.
The food was reasonably priced and very good. And there was plenty of it. Contrary to the other review I read, I thought the salad was very good; much better than many pizza joints I’ve been to. It was not iceberg lettuce, and it had plenty of olives, tasty cheese, and tomatoes. Good dressing, too. The bread sticks were delicious, as was the dipping sauce, which we though might have been homemade. We were happy to have a lot of leftover pizza, as I can assure you it may not even make it to lunch the next day before I destroy the rest of it. I’m not a big thin crust guy, or at least I thought I wasn’t until I tried Zaa’s. Everything tasted fresh and flavorful.
As for the ambiance, we thought it was pretty groovy, sorta artsy with some cubist-​like pizza-​themed prints, along with some interesting old Tigers black and white photos, plus I was able to catch some of the Tigers game on the LCD (or plasma) TV. Finally, the music was pretty good ol’ blues and some Sinatra as I recall, among other similar genres. We were all cool with that. No techno or rap to unsettle my stomach. Excellent.

Yum yum yum! Used a groupon and got the old school zaa, chocolate piadina and antipasto salad. Pizza was great! Fresh, thin crust. Loved it! The piadina was outstanding, too. It’s basically a nutella calzone. The salad was decent too, although I would’ve used better lettuce. All in all, great place!

Simply unique.
Well, no. Not really. It is pizza, after all, one of thousands of places out there. But Zaa does do one thing really well — thin crust. Not just floppy New York style thin crust, but cracker-​crisp crust that really lets their tasty toppings shine through.
We ordered a large ($ 14) Woodward Ave pizza, complete with crispy pepperoni, jalapenos, meatballs, and basil. Jalapenos and crispy pepperoni was a great mix, especially on their crispy crust. Basil tasted very fresh and gave a good aromatic kick. And hungry folks need not worry, the pizza was a good foot and a half by two feet in size.
The dessert we got was a Nutella calzone, which was not bad at all. Be warned that the «small» calzone is still a dinner plate of sliced up bits of Nutella heaven.
So why only 3 stars? They need to work on the rest of offerings a bit. The garlic bread was cold and the marinara sauce tasted like Ragu pasta sauce. The salad bar (which they gave us free, normally $ 4) had a good assortment of meats and cheeses, but only anemic wilted shredded iceburg lettuce and obviously had not been replenished since morning.
All in all, a good place teetering on the border of being a great place.