When I was a kid, my favorite kind of pizza was pepperoni. Gawd, I loved the stuff. Now I like it okay, but it’s far from my favorite. Oddly, I’ve been talking to a couple other people that say that they loved pepperoni as a kid but now don’t like it as much. Is that the case for any of you? Is there something about pepperoni that makes kids like it and adults not like it?
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Forty-five pounds ago, four pieces of pizza wasn’t nuthin. Twenty-five pounds ago it was a challenge. Now it’s pointless, unless the pieces are small.
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Clancy and I were driving from the airport when we decided to get a bite to eat. A pizza place was recommended to us by the rental car guy, but it was closed. We decided to eat at Subway instead. We were not particularly enthusiastic. In fact, we had really gotten our hearts set on pizza. At about the same time we saw a Pizza Hut and a local place. Having eaten at Pizza Hut 100 times, we decided to try out the local place.
The first words out of my mouth when we got in my car afterwards was “We should have eaten at Pizza Hut.” The bread sticks were cold and tough. The pizza itself was about the quality you expect from the spinner at a truck stop. It wasn’t terrible, but it was audaciously bland. When we got to Dent County (about two hours away from the airport) and got settled, we decided that we didn’t want to go out again. So we ordered pizza. When you have a craving for pizza, mediocre pizza doesn’t cut it. We tried a local place recommended to us. It was pretty good. Unfortunately, they don’t have a Pesto option. We’ve gotten spoiled the last couple places that we’ve lived with pesto pizza. Looks like there is no pesto option in Dent County. Boo.
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As many of you have heard, Domino’s Pizza has kinda-sorta apologized for the quality of their product and promises to do better.
I am just old enough to remember when Domino’s came out of nowhere to dominate the industry. They never succeeded based on the taste of the pizza. They didn’t have to because of their delivery system. Plus, as with a lot of chains, you can get by on not being good just so long as you are not bad. And I maintain that they weren’t bad. I remember places that were worse. I remember Pizza Hut bring roughly as good. So I don’t think the issue is so much the terrible taste of Domino’s Pizza but rather how much better the competition has gotten. Papa John’s entered the scene with a really good product. Then Pizza Hut stepped up their game. Domino’s, meanwhile, was living off the name it made based on its ability to deliver. One step above Little Caesar’s in quality and three steps above on price.
Pepperoni was by far the dominant ‘za topping when I was in college. In fact, it was rare to see anything else. Today I prefer ’shroom, though pepperoni is okay.
Comment by Peter — January 18, 2010 @ 12:31 pm
I wonder if mushrooms have a strong age-component as well. Hated them when I was younger, but love them now.
Comment by trumwill — January 18, 2010 @ 12:33 pm
Funny, I was thinking about (and eating) pizza this weekend myself. On Friday, I had a small pizza as an appetizer at a high-end restaurant near my mother’s. It was excellent. On Saturday, I wanted to try the new Dominoes pizza after seeing those commercials, so we ordered one for dinner. I hadn’t eaten Dominoes since college. It was a little better than their old pizza, but still meh. We got the “Brooklyn” crust but it was dry, scratchy and flavorless.
I was left craving real pizza Sunday night at around 11pm so I ordered from a local place (Amalfi Pizzeria in not-too-far-away Carlstadt, NJ) Cheryl had spotted on the highway that day — one we’d never ordered from before. Good stuff, much better than Dominoes. And this local place is open until 3am 7 days.
Wasn’t a big fan of pepperoni as a kid or now.
Re Pizza Hut, they used to have a pizza that was really good: “The Natural” — it had a whole grain crust, organic sauce, etc. Then they got rid of it, because it wasn’t popular.
Whole grain crusts are tough to find locally. Pretty much the only place to get them is at Whole Foods (which we order from sometimes). A few years ago, we went to Buenos Aires on vacationn, and whole grain crusts were pretty common (they called them “integral” down there).
Re Papa Johns, I had it once, when I was setting up a Papa Johns franchise with an online 401k from a start-up I worked for (a couple of our investors owned the franchise). I got a free slice there and it tasted like crap.
Pretty much any local place around here beats the national chains, with one exception: there was a great pizza place/Italian restaurant in the town next door to the one I grew up in, and in recent years, the owners of it franchised it and now there are a dozen or so locations. The one near us has pizza which is awful. Part of the reason for the difference, I think, is that the local outpost is an Italian-free zone: the entire staff appears to be Mexican or Central American. The other reason seems to be that their equipment looks different than the equipment used in the mother ship location.
Comment by DaveinHackensack — January 18, 2010 @ 3:28 pm
As a fellow New Yorker, I’d argue that the local pizzerias deliver a great pizza, but the only decent chain that’s remotely tolerable to me is Pizza Hut. For some reason, Dominos was popular with the employees at my former employer, and I could never really understand why…
BTW, as to toppings, I’ve switched over from sausage toppings to pepperoni. Once in a while if I’m bored, I’ll swap back…
Comment by David Alexander — January 18, 2010 @ 7:52 pm
Domino’s, when I was growing up, had FAR better crust than Pizza Hut.
And despite their commercials and their fans, I can’t stand the taste of Papa John’s pizza.
Comment by web — January 18, 2010 @ 9:37 pm
My all-time favorite pizza joint, not too far from where I used to live until 1997, owes its title to atmosphere as much as the ‘za itself. Don’t get me wrong, the pizza is very good. But the atmosphere is just what a pizza parlor should be like, at least to my way of thinking: three or four different small rooms in an older frame building, all dimly lit with few windows, dark walls, and old-fashioned high back booths. Going there is like stepping back in time and somehow makes the pizza taste even better than it is.
Comment by Peter — January 18, 2010 @ 10:58 pm
I find the animosity towards Papa John’s pizza fascinating. I absolutely loved the stuff. It was they who got me back into thick crust pizza in the first place. Prior to them, I couldn’t stand it.
All of this talk about local places and local chains reminds me of a tidbit. By far, the worst pizza around was a local delivery place. Even back then, I could barely stand the stuff. And I’m a guy that eats at Cici’s!
In both Estacado and here, we found some pretty good local places. We’ve found that pizza is bad for us, though, so we haven’t order pizza in quite some time except when we’re out of town.
Comment by trumwill — January 19, 2010 @ 1:06 am
As a side note, I’m disgusted by the service from the delivery chains around here these days. Pizza Slut generally can’t find my house (half the time I get some idiot on the phone who insists I, 5 miles down the road from them, am “outside our service area”). Domino’s sticks you on hold for ~15 minutes before taking your order.
For weekend get-togethers, my friends and I have mutually agreed on “screw it, just pick up a couple of the $3-5 pizzas from the grocery store and we’ll toss them in the oven when we’re ready” approach. It also costs us approximately 1/3 as much (Pizza Hut’s prices have gotten INSANE lately… $12 for a 6-inch by 7-inch pasta? $15 for a 12-inch diameter, one-topping pizza? Really?).
Comment by web — January 19, 2010 @ 7:44 am
Like web, I made the move to frozen pizza. I like “California Pizza Kitchen”. They have a nice, light flavor.
Comment by kirk — January 19, 2010 @ 10:10 pm