Review: Papa John's - Sweet Chili Chicken Pizza

Papa John's new, limited-time Sweet Chili Chicken Pizza features pineapple, onions, red peppers, and breaded white meat chicken with a sweet chili sauce in lieu of pizza sauce.

It cost me $12 for a large.

Surprisingly, the chicken pieces actually turned out crisp; all the other times I've gotten a Papa John's pizza with breaded chicken on it, it's been pretty soft. Other than that, they're a blank chicken canvas for the sweet chili sauce. There were usually 3 or 4 small chunks per slice.

The sweet chili sauce is mostly sweet, tangy, and just slightly spicy. As it sauces the entire pizza, it is the most prevalent flavor. The thing is it, the sauce alone is already really sweet, and then, they decided to add other sweet ingredients from the slightly sweet onions and red peppers to the tangy sweet pineapples. It's halfway to a dessert pizza.

The pineapples were the most abundant topping. They were moderately crisp and decently flavorful. The onions and red peppers were mostly lost in the sea of sugars.

The cheese were pretty tasteless. It didn't do much here except keep the ingredients on. It's a little weird to have cheese with sweet chili sauce.

I ordered the crust well done and the end pieces made for just good crispy breadsticks to dip in the provided garlic butter-like sauce.

Overall, Papa John's Sweet Chili Chicken Pizza was interesting but a little strange. It felt like eating Panda Express' Sweetfire Chicken Breast, but on bread... and with a lot less chicken. At least, it's not the weird awfulness of the previous Double Pickle Cheeseburger Pizza but they could have done better here if they had not gone all crazy with the sweet ingredients and just done a Hawaiian pizza drizzled with sweet chili sauce.

Nutritional Info - Papa John's Large Sweet Chili Chicken Pizza
Serving Size - 1 slice (160g)
Calories - 330 (from Fat - 80)
Fat - 9g (Saturated Fat - 4g)
Sodium - 830mg
Carbs - 49g (Sugar - 13g)
Protein - 13g