I’ll start this review off with a statement – this restaurant is cashless.  This is a (sadly, not) new trend, that I will begin to track. Some places are great about letting you know their payment policies, others not so much so, so I’ll be adding that upfront to future reviews and updating older ones as I get around to it.  Humble Pie was straight forward about it – there was a sign on the door, so no question there.

I found out about Humble Pie in the same list of Atlanta pizzas that took me to Firewall.  On this Friday night, as we were driving thru the city at 5:30, dinner was a great way to avoid traffic. From a couple of menus, reviewed on the phone, while we sat on the connector my beloved chose Humble Pie.  This restaurant is located in the (relatively) new Interlock development, at the corner of 14th Street and Howell Mill. The development has several restaurants and a hotel and is VERY proud of their parking – charging $15.45 for two hours, (using the Park Mobile app).

Arriving we were seated in an open space, fairly quickly and took a look at the menus. Opened in 2022, by the team behind Lazy Betty’s (which just received a Michelin star and is on “the list”) and Juniper Cafe (which closed it’s restaurant side before we ever made it), the menu has pizzas, a few entrees and a list of sharables. On the positive side, the food was of excellent quality. And,from the menu, was locally sourced. I ordered a pizza,

“the Carnivore” – “red-sauce” pizza with braised short rib, Fripper’s pepperoni and bacon. They cook these in a wood fired oven and the crust had an appropriate level of char. It wouldn’t stand up to the “hold a slice by the crust and see if it droops test”, but I think that was because of the weight of the chunks of short rib. Otherwise, the crust wasn’t “floppy”. This was an exceptional pizza. Slightly salty (I’m sure from the pork trifecta) with a perfect complement of sauce and cheese. I would definitely order a pizza again. But then there was the negative side, which had two prongs:

It was pricey. A margherita pizza was $21 – and was the cheapest pizza on the menu. Entrees were $19 – $26 (which isn’t high), but included the $21 burger. And that takes us to prong number two:

The burger – grass fed single beef patty, LTO, American cheese, garlic aioli, dill pickle and fries. Nothing wrong there – the burger was cooked exactly as asked and served with a mountain of fries. It was when the server asked, “Can I get you anything else?”, that the issue began:

“Can I get some mustard?”, queries my wife.

The waiter leaves the table and as he returns, he says “We don’t have any mustard.” Huh? “We didn’t ever have a demand for it, so we stopped ordering it.” My wife called bs on that answer. So he went to check “the freeezer” for some. Needless to say, they had no mustard in the freezer (which a manager later explained was what they called the walk in pantry when we asked why anyone would keep mustard in a freezer) either. We asked if they stopped ordering any of the hundreds of bottles of liquor because they didn’t have demand for it regularly. He admitted it was a fair question. But he didn’t answer.

They did manage to provide mayo when asked. But here’s the core thing – you serve a $21 cheeseburger. FWIW, you’re located across the street from a Shake Shack. I, honestly, thought about running across the street to get some packets. I also contemplated ordering some packets from Amazon and having them delivered.

You don’t stop ordering a $5.24 bottle of French’s mustard (I checked Amazon) because there wasn’t demand. It’s a choice. Just own it.