Eaton's

For about ten years, people have been telling me the same thing “You need to try Eaton’s. It’s the best pizza in Oshkosh. Ten years is a long time to ignore a pizza recommendation, especially when Eaton’s on Oshkosh Avenue is about a mile from where I work and could easily be a stop on my way home. But I’m also the kind of person who finds something I like and keeps going back. When you already believe you’ve found the best pizza in town, apparently it takes a decade of peer pressure to convince you to look somewhere else. So, in June 2026, I finally tried Eaton’s. Naturally, the real test was an XL sausage and pepperoni. I also ordered a medium pepperoni for the kids and a 10-inch gluten-free pizza with sausage, fresh mushrooms, onions, black olives, and no cheese for my wife. The no-cheese pizza always makes me curious. Obviously, leaving off the cheese is easy, but cheese is also one of the more expensive ingredients on a pizza. So what happens when you remove it? Does the price change? Do you get more toppings? Does nothing happen? I don’t know the official answer, but I can tell you that my wife’s pizza was loaded with toppings. The others? I'll get there. Eaton’s is pure take-and-bake, so unlike Pizza King on Ohio Street, there’s no option to have them cook it for you. I ordered ahead, walked in, and could actually see my pizzas sitting in the cooler waiting for me. The place was busy, which is usually a good sign. There were four or five employees working behind the counter, customers ordering, people moving around the store, and more coming through the door. But only one person appeared to be handling the register. So I waited somewhere around 10 to 15 minutes for pizzas that were already made and ready to go, at least it felt like 15 minutes. This is where reviewing a restaurant gets interesting. Does everything that happens before the first bite affect how the pizza eventually tastes? I’d like to think I can separate the two, but by the time I reached the counter, I had already waited longer than expected, noticed the price was quite a bit higher than what I normally pay at Pizza King, and could see through the wrap that there weren’t nearly as many toppings on the sausage and pepperoni pizza as I was used to. To be clear, the young woman who eventually helped me was great. She had a nice personality, was helpful, and made the actual checkout experience easy. But I still walked out wondering whether everything that happens before the first bite quietly followed me home. I’m almost always late leaving work, and this day was no exception. By the time I got home, it was around 5:30 p.m., and I still had three pizzas to cook. Thankfully, I have two ovens, so we got all three cooking at once. A little after 6:00, I finally cut into the XL sausage and pepperoni. Pizza King cuts its pizzas into squares. Eaton’s gave me control of my own destiny, so I went with large triangles. That’s when the topping problem became impossible to ignore. On a 16-inch pizza, most of my large slices had two to four pieces of pepperoni and two or three pieces of sausage (Maybe one or two slices had three sausages on it). I know this because I counted. Welcome to Za Critic. I was starving, the pizza was piping hot, and my first bite was good. I definitely wasn’t disappointed. The problem was that it was almost too hot to really taste, so I made it through about half a slice before slowing down and letting everything cool. Even then, one thing was already obvious: I wanted more toppings. A lot more. When I order a sausage and pepperoni pizza, I want both toppings in almost every bite. I don’t want to strategically plan my way through a slice or get one loaded bite followed by two bites of mostly cheese and sauce. I want coverage. After I shared my first thoughts online, someone told me they believed I could double the toppings for another dollar (I verified that this is an option from .90 cents to $1.80 depending on the pizza size). That’s a great option, but it’s also where my Pizza King bias becomes impossible to ignore. If the pizza I’m comparing you against is already less expensive, already gives me more toppings, already has outstanding sausage, and consistently gives me a great experience, paying even more to get the topping coverage I want becomes a tough sell. Then the pizza cooled down, and that’s when Eaton’s really started making its case. The sauce is excellent. Seriously. It’s balanced, more savory than sweet, with the right amount of salt and a beautiful red color. The consistency is slightly thinner than Pizza King’s, and once the pizza cooled enough for me to really taste everything, I started wondering if I might actually like Eaton’s sauce a little more. That is not something I expected to say. The cheese was also right where I wanted it. Good coverage without being heavy, and it ran close to the edge. Because we controlled the bake, it came out exactly how we wanted it. The sausage had good flavor. I just wish I could have experienced more of it. There simply wasn’t enough on the pizza for the sausage to establish itself. I’d get a bite with sausage and think, “That’s good,” and then spend the next few bites waiting to find it again. That was frustrating because the flavor was there. The crust became the biggest disagreement between Eaton’s reputation and our family’s experience. My daughter didn’t like it. She described it as too thin, almost cardboard-thin, and difficult to bite through. She felt like it wanted to be chewy but couldn’t quite get there because there wasn’t enough crust to work with. The interesting part? I was thinking almost exactly the same thing. I just hadn’t said it out loud. I went back to their menu and found a thicker crust option and then I started wondering...should I have been responsible for knowing this on my first call or should the person taking my order have asked me which crust option I wanted? It was very clear on the call that I was a first time customer because...well, I said it. My middle son enjoyed the pizza overall, but he wasn’t sold on the crust either. By that point, all of us were also talking about the lack of toppings on the traditional pizzas. Except for my wife’s gluten-free, no-cheese pizza. That thing had generous (appropriate) amount of toppings. Maybe it was compensation for leaving off the cheese. Maybe that’s simply how that particular pizza was made. Either way, it had the topping generosity I wanted to see on the sausage and pepperoni. So where does that leave Eaton’s? It’s good pizza. Actually, the more the pizza cooled and the more I could taste the sauce, cheese, sausage, and pepperoni together, the more I understood why people like it. The sauce is absolutely a contender for the best in Oshkosh. The sausage has good flavor. The cheese is well balanced. And with more toppings, I think the entire experience changes. But I keep coming back to the same thing. For years, people have told me Eaton’s is "the best pizza in Oshkosh." After finally trying it, I wonder if some of them are exactly like me. They found their place, they know their order, they love what they get, and they stopped looking. Maybe the people who swear by Eaton’s need to try a few more places. And maybe the guy who spent years swearing by Pizza King needed to finally try Eaton’s. That’s really the whole point of this. I know I’m biased, and I’m learning that being a pizza critic means recognizing that bias instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. My job isn’t to tell you what pizza you’re allowed to like. It’s to explain exactly what I experienced, what matters to me, and why I landed where I did. Eaton’s gave me a very good pizza. The sauce may even have beaten my favorite. But from the moment I walked in to the final bite, there were too many things keeping it from taking the crown: the wait for a pizza that was already made, the higher price, the lack of topping generosity, and a crust that nobody in my family really loved. I’m going back. That’s important. Next time, I’ll probably pay the extra dollar and double the toppings, because there’s enough good happening here that I want to know what this pizza becomes when every bite gets the sausage and pepperoni it deserves. But after ten years of people telling me I needed to try the best pizza in Oshkosh, I finally did and Pizza King on Ohio Street is still the King!