Four words: excessive use of teeth.
Pizza purists, go ahead and skip the next paragraph.
While I am strongly in the “yes, there’s such a thing as bad pizza” camp, I am a big fan of many things that the purists would refuse to call pizza. A marvelous place in California makes things like a cashew-chicken pizza with feta cheese and a salmon pesto pizza with white sauce. They’re marvelous. And what are you talking about with folding pizza? A thick crust pizza shouldn’t fold well, and a thin crust pizza will just break. The only folding pizzas I’ve had were soggy marginally-edible delivery pizzas from places like shudder Domino’s.
Hint: kill the squid before putting it on the pizza.
Chuck E Cheese and Little Ceasars are both on the do not eat on pain of death list. Those are both worse than anything I’ve ever gotten in the freezer section or at school.
And my philosophy concerning pizza is that it’s never too late for breakfast or too early for pizza.
So yes, there are pizzas I would have to be absolutely starving to eat. BJ’s on the other hand, I’ve has some that weren’t stellar, but none that would make me swear off.
Teeth, mainly.
… a lesson I learned thanks to someone who liked Imo’s pizza, now I think of it.
edit: curse you, Malthus!
I concur. I’ve had some awful pizza. (I won’t bother going on about Dominos, because if you don’t recognize that as bad, there’s no hope for you anyway.)
Even those crappy school pizzas can be decent in that lowered-standards kind of way (plus ours were on sourdough). But I’m annoyed now when I spend $2 or $3 on a shitty slice. I’m looking at you, Bus Stop and Volare and Mythic and Victoria and Extreme and Sunset. Excessively greasy, cheap meats, bad cheese… just awful.
I try not to be a food snob, really I do. My favorite lunch anywhere in the world is a hot dog from a greasy place where flies breed. And I loves me some buffalo wings, even marginally passable ones. And Og forgive me, I’m planning on going to McDonald’s in about 20 minutes.
But I have developed a general intolerance for pizza. I don’t know of any of the big chains near me, but to me most pizzas that come from a Greek-owned sub shop are culinary crimes. The crust is like greasy spongecake. If it’s fresh out of the oven, it’s awful. If it’s been sitting around for what looks like days, then it’s nothing less than an inducement to hurl.
There are only three places I know of that not only serve an edible pie, but raise it to Beardian levels of greatness. And none of them are easily accessable to me.
I’m with you here. There are so many different styles of pizza out there, each with their own particular strengths, that I really don’t see a point in declaring one style of pizza superior to another. There’s room for them all, but I do seek the exemplars of each particular style. My personal favorite style of pizza are those Neapolitan styles (some New York and New Haven fits in here), with a charred, slightly sour crust, and a simple assortment of sparse toppings. The types of pizza that are put into an 800-1000 degree oven and made in 60-90 seconds. They’re crispy on the outside, but a little softer towards the center of the pizza, quite often eaten with a knife and fork. The quality of the bread and freshness of toppings is the key to this style.
However, I am also a great friend of cracker-crust pizza, as exemplified by Vito & Nicks, Marie’s, and Pat’s here in Chicago, and a place like Zaffiro’s in Milwaukee. These are thin crusts, crispy all over, with generally a more heavily spiced sauce and cheese than their Italian counterparts, cooked in a 500-550 degree oven.
And, yes, every once in awhile a California-style pizza will hit the spot, as will a Chicago-style deep-dish or stuffed pizza. My preference is heavily towards thin crusts, but variety is the spice of life, as they say. It would be a far sadder world if only one type of pizza were available to us.
I’ll agree that it can be quite grating.
Nitpick: That quote (in various forms) is attributed to H.L. Mencken.
Seriously. A Little Caesar’s opened up not too far away from my house. One day after work, the weather was nice so I figured I’d stop by and pickup one of those $5 pizzas. It smelled, looked, and tasted horrible. Like hot vomit. Never again. Never again.
I could barely read the rest of the thread for laughing at this. Am I going to hell?
“Red, the blood of angry men! Black, the dark of angles past!”