My wife picked it because she’d heard about the pizza from a woman in her book club. I agreed because I was tired of making decisions. That’s how we ended up at Brick Oven on a Thursday night, sitting on the patio off Wadley Avenue while the sun finally backed off and the temperature dropped to something a person could tolerate.
Brick Oven has been around Midland long enough that it doesn’t need to explain itself. The building sits on Wadley near Garfield, unadorned in that way that places with loyal regulars can afford to be. Inside, it’s warm without being dim — wooden tables, not too loud, the kind of place where you can hear your dinner companion without leaning in. We asked to sit outside anyway, and the patio was comfortable well into the evening.
We started with the bruschetta, which came out fast and tasted like somebody had actually tasted it before plating it — good olive oil, real tomato, not drowning in anything. My wife ordered the chicken pesto pizza and I got the classic pepperoni, mostly because I think you learn more about a pizza kitchen from the simple things than from the elaborate ones. Both came out of the actual wood-fired oven they’re named for, with that particular char on the edge of the crust that you can’t fake in a conveyor machine. The pepperoni had some good curl and crisp to it. The crust was thin but had structure — it didn’t fold in half and dump toppings on you.
We also split a Caesar salad, which was a Caesar salad, correctly made. Sometimes that’s all you want.
The pasta options are worth noting if pizza isn’t your thing. The table next to us had what looked like a lasagna, and it arrived in one of those deep ceramic dishes that holds heat. I regretted not ordering it for about four seconds before the pizza arrived.
Price-wise, two pizzas, a salad, an appetizer, and two drinks ran us somewhere around fifty-five to sixty-five dollars before tip. For what you get, that felt right. This isn’t the cheap end of Midland dining, but it’s not performing luxury either — it’s just a place that charges fair money for food made with some care.
Service was attentive without being intrusive. Our water got refilled without asking, which remains my single most reliable measure of a well-run dining room. The waitstaff moved like they’d been there a while, which I mean as a compliment.
If you’re going on a weekend, make a reservation or be prepared to wait a bit — the dining room fills up, and it’s not a large space. Weeknights are easier. Either way, the patio is a good call from about October through April, when West Texas is actually willing to cooperate.
We’ve been back once since that Thursday. My wife got the chicken pesto again, which I took as an endorsement. I tried the margherita the second time, and I’d order it again without hesitation. Brick Oven doesn’t do anything that needs a long explanation. It just makes pizza in a wood-fired oven and does it consistently well, which in a town where the dining options can swing wildly in quality, is worth more than it sounds.
