Restaurant: Stone Hearth Pizza, Belmont, MA

It's not often that I get the opportunity to write one post for two blogs, but Stone Hearth Pizza in Belmont, MA fits the bill. We've dined at the Stone Hearth Pizza in Cambridge near Porter Sq., but the restaurant there is small, cramped, and suffers from slow service. We'd heard that the Belmont restaurant was larger and had better kid amenities, so we decided to check it out.

The Belmont restaurant is indeed about three times the size of the Cambridge location and rather more plush, but it had no kid amenities at all. And where the Cambridge location has one wall covered with placemats colored in by their underage patrons, the Belmont location has no such kid-friendly atmosphere.

The food, as always, is quite good. Stone Hearth Pizza uses local, mostly organic ingredients. Their menu and their pizza boxes feature a map of New England showing exactly where their ingredients come from (see a complete list here). Their pizzas are inventive and tasty. Our favorites are the Sausage and Carmelized Onion pizza and Bacon and Blue pizza.

This time out, we tried the Farm Fresh pizza, which sounded great on paper: "Garlic oil, cherry tomatoes, charred red/yellow peppers, Yukon gold potatoes, artichoke hearts, green/black olives, fresh mozzarella, topped with salad of arugula/red onion/prosciutto." Unfortunately, the olives completely overwhelmed the flavors of the other vegetables. When we picked the olives off (to our omnivorous two-year-old's delight), we discovered that the pizza without them had hardly any flavor at all.

The girls had better luck with their pizzas. Our five-year-old practically inhaled her cheese pizza, and our two-year-old had to compete with her daddy to finish her cheeseburger pizza. We knew from past experience to stay away from the mac 'n' cheese, which was oddly too spicy for the kids to eat. I like it that way, but the kids won't touch it.

The kid's meals included drinks (lemonade and chocolate milk, respectively) and desserts, a choice of cookies or gelato. Both girls chose the gelato, vanilla and chocolate respectively, and my husband also ordered the hazelnut. The vanilla gelato's vanilla flavor was overpowering, and my five-year-old gratefully traded her sister for the chocolate when she was done with it. My husband's hazelnut gelato was chunky with bits of hazelnut but also somehow over-flavored. The chocolate, however, was quite good.

Regardless of how good the meals were and the quality of the ingredients, we got some mild sticker shock from the price: $8.50 for a kid's meal is a bit much, especially when we paid only $12.50 for our own pizza. Then again, when you do the math, an 8" cheese pizza is $5.60, a drink is $2, and gelato is $4 (two cookies are $1), for a total of $11.60, which means the kid's meal is actually a bargain. I do wish, however, that just one of the kid's meals had included vegetables.

Overall, while I applaud Stone Hearth Pizza's commitment to local, organic foods, I'm not all that impressed by either their pizzas or their prices. Zing! Pizza in Porter Sq. also uses local, organic ingredients, has more interesting and inventive pizzas, is less expensive, and they deliver. Their restaurant is seriously tiny, though, so if you want to eat out, Stone Hearth pizza is a better bet. If you're eating in Cambridge, I recommend that you call ahead and order in advance to compensate for the slow wait staff. For the record, the service at the Belmont location was fine.