Pizza

Lileks has a fine semi-screed on pizzas. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait.

I am told (and vaguely remember, though I’m uncertain whether they are manufactured memories to match what I’ve been told) that there was a time as a child when I didn’t care for pizza. I hold that memory to me as evidence of How Things Change whenever Kitten seems particularly intransigent about something we take for granted, like getting her hair washed.

I love pizza. Pizza is great. It tastes good. It’s hot. It’s easy. And someone else makes it for you. Indeed, the only disadvantage of pizza is that, no matter what the DiGiorno ads tell you, there is no such thing as a great home-cooked pizza. There is good home-cooked pizza, but not great. Home ovens are just not hot enough to crisp things the way they need crisping. All the home-made pizza dough and home made pizza sauce and home-grown pepperonis and home-pressed cheese will make up for a wimpy home oven.

So in order to enjoy pizza, one must order pizza. It’s sort of like a zen koan. Home-cooked pizza is a snack, an ever-hopeful experiment. Delivered pizza rocks.

When my first wife and I visited our friend Chris in Chicago, a few geological ages ago, we went on a quest for the best pizza in town. We were there for four or five days, and went out to the top-rated pizza places each night. We had some fabulous pizza — stuffed, deep-dish pizza is to the ordinary Domino’s delivery what a loaf of asiago cheese bread is to poker chips. I don’t recall what my favorite was, but Cheryl and Chris voted for Gino’s East. Since I’ve since gotten divorced, you can see how seriously I take my pizza.

Which brings up another greatly attractive feature of pizza: nearly everyone likes it (my own childhood predilictions aside), and you can order multiple ones, and do up the halves differently, and get something that nearly everyone will eat. Unless they’re off of bread products. For myself, pepperoni and mushrooms are the standard; I’ll accept sausage as a substitute, but prefer not. Breakfast bacon, onions, and peppers are good add-ons. Olives are okay, as are ham, canadian bacon, etc. Pineapple is right out, and anchovies belong on Caesar salads, and that’s it.

If there is a weak link in the pizza chain, it is that ordering process. Ordering a pizza on the phone is like giving dictation — you nearly have to have everything written out ahead of time in order to get the order straight, given the wide array of options, and the pizza folks don’t make things any easier by their blizzard of coupon offers (“Half-priced medium two toppings with any jumbo one-topping thin-crust except if it’s dark on Tuesdays!”). Then there’s the Delivery Area conundrum, figuring out which cross-streets will be most informative, and, naturally, whether your coupons are still good.

The smarter pizza chains are spending some bucks to do on-line ordering systems — pull up the web page, select the sizes, drag the ingredients over, plug in your address and phone and all, and your order is on its way. This is such a nice way to order pizza, it astounds me that anyone still survives who doesn’t do it this way — except that it’s still in the minority, since it does require an investment, and makes the most sense for pizza chains.

Even mediocre pizza is good pizza (along the lines of ice cream, frankly). My own local favorite is the Pudge Brothers chain. Their crust is extra-bland, but they make up for it with a very nicely spicy sauce. (A word of advice, though, guys: simply scanning your menus and putting them online does not constitute a meaningful web presence.)

There is one area of the world of pizza which I do not understand — folks being willing to eat cold pizza the next day. But, then, I don’t get pasta salads or escargot, either, so don’t listen to me when I talk about how unnatural such a practice is. The charm of pizza is in the confluence of hot tomato sauce, hot grease, and hot bread; serving it up cold is like — well, it’s like cold pizza fergoshsakes. I mean, if the delivery guy brought it to the house cold and coagulated, you’d be righteously torqued, right? What makes it any more palatable the next morning, pulled from the fridge?

Sadly, Margie partakes in this ghastly ritual. Fortunately for her, I don’t take my pizza aesthetics that seriously, and it is a good excuse to buy an extra-large instead of a large — since, after all, I know someone will take care of the left-overs.