Recently, yet another Italian/pizza/wings/catering place opened in Troy. Basil City, located at 2304 15th Street, piqued my friends’ and my interest for its sudden appearance in the area. As off-campus college students, we threw around the idea of trying it, and then a flyer in the mail showed its interesting list of 40 flavors for wings, along with the various pizza and assortment of Italian subs and dinners. This list of flavors includes the standard hot options, then other interesting names including “Burning Human,” “Peanut Butter and Fluff,” and “Peanut Butter and Jelly.”
When we finally got around to formulating our order, we saw that it did not open until 3 pm and closes at 2 am on the prime late-night pizza weekends—definitely a college student accommodation. The order, to be delivered, was finalized to a large half-bacon, half-just-cheese pizza, 20 (two orders) bone-in Bourbon barbecue wings, and a half order of bone-in peanut butter and jelly wings.
The order was placed shortly after 3 pm. Because they just opened, it was a little bit of a messy affair. Delivery finally arrived somewhere around 4:15 pm after we were promised 45 minutes for the order. To be fair, they had just had their grand opening. The delivery guy was quite friendly, but there was a delivery charge ($1), which many other local pizza places do not have.
First, we tried the peanut butter and jelly wings. They possessed a good crunch, the jelly part was very subtle if not absent, but there was a definite taste and feel of peanut butter to the wings. We were glad we ordered only a half order of them. The Bourbon barbecue wings were not as crunchy but certainly very tasty. Both flavors are good if you are not a spicy wing person.
Upon research of the “Burning Human” sauce, it turns out to be made with ghost pepper extract, and there is a Burning Human wing-eating challenge. Ghost peppers are the level of spicy that you do not handle the ingredient with bare skin, so that challenge is probably not our thing.
The full orders of wings include dipping sauces and celery. The ratio of celery to the 20 wings was skewed towards not enough celery, and the bleu cheese dipping sauce was determined to be very cheesy. However, the delivered wings were swimming in their sauce, so there was plenty to dip the celery in.
The pizza itself was comparable to other local options. While DaVinci’s and Big Apple put larger square pieces of bacon on their slices, the half we ordered (and were charged for half a topping, thankfully) had much smaller, crumbled pieces of bacon, which offered a better distribution throughout the slices. The sauce in particular was tastier than other red sauces. Over the phone, we had asked for thin crust, but it was probably lost in translation somewhere in the order. We found the crust to be standard.
The wings were decent, perhaps not for the price but the weirder flavors are definitely worth trying for the more adventurous. The pizza has to compete with the free (and faster) delivery and prices of the other pizza places around here. We will likely try this place again to continue sampling the many wing sauce offerings, and maybe even have a taste of the promised “Burning Human” sauce. Or not, out of self-preservation.