Felix and Oscars

Pizza was good. Onion Tanglers were awesome. Wish they had tv’s in the back party rooms.

If you’re looking for authentic Chicago style pizza, Felix and Oscar’s is the place to go. Their lunch deal is decently priced, and doesn’t take long to get. Their lunch salad bar is nothing special, but better than throwing some greens on a plate and calling it a salad. If you order a full pizza, it can take a long time to arrive.
Oh, and they deliver too!

Holy gross. The personal pizzas were like Pizza Hut experiments gone bad. The salad bar had nothing of value. No proteins, nothing that would cost any money or be of any interest to patrons.

I got the Fettuccine Alfredo with salad & breadsticks, and my friend got the Chicken Parmigian sandwich with fries. We were not at all impressed. It is dead on a Saturday afternoon for a reason. My Alfredo was so thick, it solidified while I was eating and I couldn’t finish it because of the texture. The Parmigian sandwich was worse. There was a dollop of sauce and cheese directly in the middle, with no sauce on the rest. The chicken is so full of thick cartilage, I had to cut the bite out I wanted to try. Terrible, but a convenient location if you don’t mind spending over $ 25 for bad food. Server was nice, but I didn’t get a refill and I was there for about 40 minutes.

The service has always been exceptional, the staff is always very friendly. They are very receptive to Groupons and
certificates, and the pasta is great!
When you come here, you really do get a lot of food and the prices are very reasonable.
The staff is always very friendly as well.

Good food dumpy décor

We have been 3 times in the last 2 years — this is the end.
The «Chicago» Deep Dish was our favorite and why we decided to come back 2 more times. It is not true to a Chicago deep dish, but was still a good pizza
Bad Service — The first time we had a great pizza, but ordered sausage and there was no sausage to be found on the pizza. They gave us ½ off. Second visit I ordered several appetizers that never came, again they gave us a discount.
This time I phoned ahead to order a deep dish. They served us an uncooked pizza. I showed it to the server and she said, Oh that is not cooked. They offered to try again, but we just did not have the time to wait that long for what it is.
You have to cook your food before you serve it to guests. I am not talking about a little undercooked — this was raw dough, not just in the middle but all the way to the edge — even the edge crust was raw.
The sauce reminds me a lot of Ragu — not what you expect on a $ 26 pizza.

Please remove any reference to Chicago Style Pizza from your Menu!
I ate there last night and here are the issues:
First, NO Chicago pizza dough is yeast raised, it butter ridden and made with ice cold water to insure that it stays buttery and almost crisp and flat.
Second, Sausage is cooked in the pizza, not precooked, chopped up and sparsely mixed in.
Third, NO TOPPING would ever be added to top of a Chicago Style Pizza, other than sauce, PERIOD! The canned mushrooms on top were salty and over cooked.
Lastly, sauce is not to be precooked, it should be raw tomatoes and spices when added to the pizza, and then cooked in the oven with the pie.
Don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with the pizza, but there is no reason to call it «Chicago Style» just because you cooked it in a deep dish pan and no reason to charge $ 20 for a medium two topping.

Great place to take kids for pizza and spaghetti. The Chicago style is yummy.

After receiving a rave recommendation from the concierge at my hotel, and having suffered disappointing pizza earlier in the day — I was longing for a satisfying pizza experience.
This was not it. The pizza was adequate to sate my hunger — but I spent nearly $ 20 on a small pizza with a couple toppings (no cheese) that had a thin, tasteless crust that had no life in it — boring sauce and — dare I say it — the mushrooms were from a can?
It was better than nothing — which was my other option at the time.

I had heard such good things about Felix & Oscar’s so I was looking forward to trying it out. My family was in town and we decided pizza would be good and we also love Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza.
When we arrived, the lady at the front asked us how many and then said that we needed to wait for the hostess. Ok, sure. Once the hostess came, she said to follow her but then the other lady came too. The strangest part about this was that the hostess was taking us to one table while the other lady decided we should sit somewhere else. So, why did we have to wait for the hostess then!?!
The place looks old. You have to wind through what seems to be a maze to get anywhere. It just seems run down a bit which you would not expect from the outside.
Food wise, we went with a Large «The Grinder» Cheese Topper. It filled up our group of 5. The pizza was disappointing. The sauce wasn’t all that great, the Graziano’s Italian Sausage hardly had any spice and the other meat was not impressive either. I had to add the crushed peppers for any spice. The cheese and crust were good though. The pizza was also not all that hot. I would call it lukewarm. We have chalked all of this up to us getting «The Grinder» and are hoping for a better experience the next time.
Will I be back? Probably if a group I am with wants to go…

I can’t speak to the pizza (the kids pizzas my 4 and 7 year old scarfed up had seemed quite above expected for kids menu selections but I don’t think that’s a fair way to judge their regular menu), but the asiago ravioli I had was TERRIBLE! The ravioli was tastless and could have been at best straight from the frozen section at the grocery story and the sauce tasted straight from a can with no real taste whatsoever. Garlic bread had no real taste of garlic. The potion though was very generous. Others had the baked cavatelli which was said to be «okay» (looked like a lot of pasta lightly mixed with sauce then a thin layer of meat sauce and melted cheese on top) and chicken parm which was «meh.» We may have missed the boat with our ordering but I’m not planning on going back any time soon to try again…

I’m sad to say that as of the time of this review I have not been fotunate enough to have had Chicago style deep dish pizza in Chicago. Until that time comes I can only pretend to know what I’m talking about when reviewing Chicago style deep dish pizza. With that being said, my wife and I first visited Felix & Oscar’s on ⁴⁄₂₂.
The first thing I noticed upon arriving was that the lobby smelled like it had recently been cleaned with a dirty mop. This didn’t exactly get my appetite going, but I chalked that up to the fact that they had just recently opened up for dinner. The rest of the interior didn’t really have us jumping up and down with excitement either. It’s a very plain interior, dimly lit, and almost has a basement feel to it.
The menu at Felix & Oscar’s has a pretty good selection of appetizers, all pretty typical of what you would expect to find at a pizza/​Italian joint. You can also find a selection of salads, pasta entrees, sandwiches, and of course pizzas. They offer three types of pizzas. A thin crust, a Chicago style deep dish, and a cheese topper pizza which is the deep dish topped with an extra layer of cheese. We kept it pretty simple and ordered mozzarella cheese sticks, and a deep dish pizza with pepperoni.
The mozzarella sticks were nothing special, but still tasty. They obviously weren’t made in house, but honestly I’m not very picky when it comes to cheese sticks. As long as they’re breaded and deep fried rather than microwaved they’re good as far as I’m concerned. The pizza was the highlight of the meal, and the entire experience at the restaurant (more on that later). The crust was definitely deep dish style. It was buttery and crispy and was probably my favorite part of the pizza. A nice layer of cheese was piled on top of the crust, and the sauce on top of the cheese. There was less sauce than I’ve come to expect from this style of pizza, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. All in all a good pie.
When I go out to eat at a restaurant, I like to think that I’m paying for two things. Food and service. Service is where Felix & Oscars really failed to deliver. My wife recognized our server, Holly, right away as a server from another restaurant we had dined at in downtown Des Moines. She seemed very flustered from the very beginning, which I didn’t quite understand since they had just recently opened for dinner and weren’t busy yet. By the time we were finished dining, she had brought the wrong food to our table twice, took our order twice because she had forgotten the first time, overcharged us, and messed up the order of two separate parties near us. She also didn’t take our pizza order until the appetizer was already on the table. The only thing we don’t know is how many tables our food was at before it made it to ours.
Although the pizza at Felix & Oscar’s was more or less a hit, we probably won’t return because of the service and their overall atmosphere.

There are pizza snobs out there that love to compare everything to the original, and many times they hold such high standard for the original that it blinds them from seeing what is in front of them. When comparing F&Os pizza to authentic deep dish pizzerias in Chicago you are probably going to notice a difference. However, this does not mean F&Os is a bad product. I personally enjoy the Bacon Cheeseburger deep dish pizza. The sauce is a ketchup/​mustard base sauce and it is topped with hamburger, bacon, onions, and pickle chips. The dough is buttery and moist. I have also heard they have some really good wings here but I have not tried them as of yet.

Conversations I have had over the past few months regaring Chicago style deep dish pizza have gone along the lines of the following:
Me: «Have you been to Wig and Pen yet? Awesome deep dish pizza. I would almost put it on par with Uno in Chicago. It’s so nice to be able to get darn good deep dish pizza in Des Moines.»
Friend/​Family Member/​Acquaintance: «No I haven’t been yet. Hey, have you been to Felix and Oscar’s? If you like deep dish, you don’t know what you’re missing».
Me: Hmmm, I should try that some time.
Meh.
There was nothing bad about my experience here. It was entirely inoffensive. But I wasn’t wowed either.
Price was good, but it’s pizza. It’s cheap.
We started with macaroni and cheese bites (after all, the pizza takes a long time to cook, and we were hungry). Nothing wrong with these, but not too much that’s right. I can’t believe I’m making the comparison, but the mac n cheese bites at the Cheesecake Factory are much better. Not that I’m a huge fan of the Factory.
The pizza arrived, and it looked pretty good. It looked like a proper deep dish. The first thing I noticed was that the pizza sauce tasted like spaghetti — not quite what i was expecting. There was an adequate amount of toppings. Not an overabundance. The crust was… ok. Nothing is wrong here, nothing is bad, it’s just not that good.
I must point out that service was right. Our server took good care of us. No complaints there.
I’ll be back to Wig and Pen, hopefully soon. I don’t see myself coming back to Felix and Oscar’s.