Bah, the only elves that make proper pizza are Neapolitan elves. I mean if you have to make do at least use Campanian elves. Geez, people don’t know their Italian elves:)
Yeah everyone knows that pizza is from Naples. Sheesh.
I’m a pizza nerd*, to the point of making plans for a brick oven on my patio. Unfortunately (in this regard) I live in the butt crack of nowhere, and my local pizza choices are Papa John’s, Pizza Hut, one local chain (Giovanni’s) that’s OK but doesn’t deliver about half the time, and Little Caesar’s, which is the one pizza I find nigh inedible.
Papa John’s is the best of the lot, but you have to ask them to do a “well done bake”, because otherwise their pizzas tend to be grossly undercooked. I’m sure it’s partially a time thing and partially the tendency of people around here to regard anything that’s undergone a molecule’s worth of the Maillard reaction as “burned”.
I can’t decide if it’s just my improved tastes or if Pizza Hut really is way, way worse than it used to be. Probably some of both. Even as their crusts went downhill you used to be able to count on them for copious amounts of toppings** compared to the rest of the chains and especially compared to the college “drunk pizza”*** joints. Now they’ve joined the race to the bottom. I still crave their breadsticks about twice a year, though, and when my colleagues want to go there for our monthly off-site faculty meeting I don’t object.
If I had even slightly better options I’d probably never order from either one, but that’s not to say they’re truly bad. Especially when they bring it to the house.
- And you know what I hate more than elitism? Anti-elitism. I’m not a better person than anyone else because I have strong opinions about pizza, but you’re not a better person because you don’t. I feel a pit thread coming on.
** Real artisan pizza can get by with sparse toppings, since the crust and sauce are good enough to stand up as the focus, but utility pizza needs a lot more to be good. In fact, I would say this is what distinguishes artisan pizza from utility pizza–in utility pizza, the crust is there to hold up the toppings, but in artisan pizza the toppings are there to complement the crust.
*** “College drunk pizza” is really its own category, I think.
$4 large cheese pizza delivered by Bruno’s in Oxford, Ohio! Sadly they’ve left us.
Washington, D.C., has a couple of competing drunk pizza joints adjacent to each other in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood – Jumbo Slice and Pizza Mart. They both boast of having the largest slices ever. It seems their patrons aren’t necessarily interested in the pizza. There are a lot of complaints of partially eaten slices littering the area.
I think it’s an SDMB thing. The pizza isn’t that great but it’s not that bad either.
They are BAKED by the slice, since no oven can hold a whole pizza that big. Yes, I’ve eaten at two of those places, both on 18th St.
Like I said before, this. The SDMB has something of a hive mind when it comes to food. We’ve got rarefied tastes, and if something isn’t either uniquely indie and local, or utterly sublime or ethereal, it causes us to projectile vomit.
The majority of middle-end delivery chain pizza is national “utility pizza”. Decent, not great, not awful.
It’s all in the cheese. Use industrial-grade low priced mozzarella and you get shitty pizza. Period. I notice that it has a rank smell that lingers for hours.
But if I am buying for myself [in other words, I am not stuck in a situation I can not get out of, like a school lunch] I want pizza that isgood, not utility pizza. Utility pizza is what you get when you are stuck at work and they order cheap crap pizzas for the masses, or in a school caffeteria.
if you have a choice between a craptastic piece of food that serves only as a calorie and micronutrient delivery system, or something that is tasty, and delivers the calories and nutrients, which would you really choose? Do you go to the grocery store and pick the cheapest almost cheese preshredded product, or a good quality mozzarella, or spotty manky veggies or nice clean unblemished veggies? manky cheap fatty pepperoni or a good quality pepperoni?
Literally the difference between utility pizza and good pizza is ingredient quality.
Nah. Threads of these types are going to draw somewhat exaggerated reviews and more passionate voices, anyway. I don’t get the sense that the average Doper has more “rarefied tastes” in food or anything. There’s plenty of eat-because-of-biological-necessity people (as opposed to eat-for-pleasure people) here, it’s just they probably are not going to pop into food opinion threads, since they don’t care.
Pizza (like barbecue or chili) is especially one of those foodstuffs people can get very vocal and passionate about, depending on their local tradition. The SDMB is not particularly special in this regard.