I’ve read and re-read what I wrote and have no idea where it was I said it represented all New York-style pizza or even all the pizza in New York. Please point it out. The particular slice I had was not good.
Believe it or not, New York is not the end all be all of everything. There is a whole country to the west and south of New York that has things that are much better than in New York.
Exactly
I want good pizza = local m&p place
Kids are having friends over = Domino’s
I’m in KC, but I grew up in Jefferson City, which is practically St. Louis. They’re is a place here that has St. Lou style pizza. Maybe more then one, but one I know of/ go to.
No, to a New Yorker, there’s really very little else out there, as The New Yorker once illustrated.
New Yorkers, all the arrogance of the French with none of the charm.
Agreed. I’d prefer freezer-burned Ellio’s over Papa John’s. Quite literally the worst pizza I’ve ever eaten in my life, and I eat pizza a lot!
Gimmee a basic genuine hand-kneaded wheat flour neapolitan pizza, with San Marzano tomatoes & water buffalo mozzerella, baked in a 900 degree F oak-fired stone oven and you can have all those chains with their horrible to mediocre products, Papa Johns included.
Oh, that’s not even fair! 
Simply put, Papa John’s suffers from delusions of adequacy, coming in third against a frozen Banquet pizza with the Banquet pizza and the box it came in taking first and second.
Yup, take and bake. Problem is, they’ve jiggered the crust so that it will come out crisp at 425F, which means that it’s like cardboard. It’s really not very good, but I understand that when you have a house full of kids and not a lot of moola, $10 is a bargain.
Pizza, like most other things, is subject to the Triangle of Desires Rule. The triangle is made up of quality, speed and price. The rule is that you can have any 2 of the three be “high”.
Want high quality pizza fast? It won’t be cheap (the largest expense in a restaurant is labor cost, 2nd is food cost)
Want high quality pizza cheap? It won’t be fast (cheap pizza = fewer employees = longer wait)
Want cheap pizza fast? It won’t be high quality (large pizza chains live here)
Unfortunately, in the world of pizza most people choose the high speed/low price combo and settle for crappy pizza.
Yeah, the only take & bake place I’ve seen around here was the Handmade Pizza Company. (Which, googling around, looks like it closed down in 2014.) I just never quite understood the point. The price of those pizzas wasn’t particularly cheap, and you still had to haul it home and bake it yourself. I guess the plus is you could choose your ingredients, but if you want a non-frozen, bake-it-yourself pizza, many supermarkets have pre-made pies just for that purpose for under $10. Heck, at Aldi, maybe even $5 for a giant pizza (and they’re pretty decent for what they are.)
Obviously, they seem to have a market in parts of the US, but it never caught on around here.
I think the best national chain is Straw Hat, although I admit I haven’t eaten there in a long time, as there aren’t any near me. Round Table is decent. All the other national chains are just fighting for who is least-bad.
But there are some EXCELLENT local chains. Around the bay area, I always enjoy any pizza from:
Pizza My Heart
Pizza Chicago
Stuft Pizza
And you’ve never left Bemidji, I see. :the old, more dismissive rolleyes:
We represent Pizza Dinosaur!
We got the most stores in the world!
Our crust is tough and our sauce is thin,
But we’re everywhere so you gotta give in!
Mona Pizza’s got nothing on us,
'Cause we’ve got 6000 stores plus!
I’ve never had Papa John’s pizza, but for reasons difficult to articulate the OP makes me want to never have it.
mmm
Kroger’s Deli used to have a take and bake pizza. They were already made and packaged. I bought a few over the years. I haven’t looked in awhile to see if they still sell them.
I guess other grocery stores sell them in their deli section?
It is a nice alternative to frozen.
-5 for being in the wrong forum. Pizza should be in Cafe Society.
If you wish to make an pizza pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Since pizza is a food, I would usually agree. However, this is about Papa Johns.