Hey, I resemble that remark. 
I do not understand how or why anyone would order chain pizza in NYC. I blame it on transplants who didn’t grow up with great local pizza, looking for something with which they are familiar. It’s the same reason there is a huge Olive Garden in Times Square. Is there some crappy pizza? Sure. But in NYC, you are rarely more than a 5 minute walk from any one pizza place to the next.
People are stupid.
Experience shows, again and again and again, that people value cheap over just about every other metric. We value it over service; we value it over quality. Even worse, we then try to convince ourselves that we get equivalent service/quality, to justify our decisions to go cheap.
Not every individual makes this determination. However, enough do that chains like Papa John’s et al not only survive, but thrive. This same determination keeps airlines like Spirit and Ryannair aloft, and it is why Amazon and Wal-Mart have become such juggernauts.
Papa John’s and its ilk are American pizza. It is what so many Americans have grown up eating and what has imprinted on them. It’s familiar, comfortable, non-threatening to many. But it isn’t good, and as for the hyperbolic claim of “greatest pizza on Earth” - it doesn’t even make the qualifying rounds.
Straw Hat is only in California and Nevada and Round Table is only along the western seaboard with the exception of Arizona, thus they aren’t national chains.
And witzel wasn’t?
Pizza
Yeah, I was wondering who in the hell those two are. For me, the national chains are: Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Little Caesar. And I think that’s it. Maybe you want to count Sbarros? But that’s just mall pizza, AFAIK. California Pizza Kitchen? But I’ve only had that frozen. Apparently, there are two actual brick-and-mortar California Pizza Kitchen in Chicago proper, and a smattering in the burbs, but that’s it.
Yeah, the AOL article was clearly written by someone with little to no restaurant experience - either that or he learned very little during his experience.
Look, the real question isn’t how Papa John’s manages to make some of the greatest pizza on earth— it’s why do they hide it from us?
Ah, I totally missed that AOL cite in the post I was asking a cite for. That just sounds crazy.
CPK was a restaurant chain long before they started licensing their name and recipes to Kraft Foods for the frozen pizza line (the frozen line is now made by Nestle). When I started working in downtown Chicago in '89, there was a CPK near the Merchandise Mart (corner of Orleans and Hubbard), where my co-workers and I regularly had lunch.
But, one big difference between CPK and the other national / regional chains is that CPK is really built around in-restaurant dining, rather than take-home (and, AFAIK, they’ve never done delivery).
while I’m not a huge fan of the style, the frozen ones can’t hold a candle to what they make in-restaurant.
When I was a kid (admittedly decades ago), Pizza Hut was built around in-restaurant dining. Their locations were sit-down restaurants with waitress service, a salad bar and pitchers of soda. And the buildings had those distinctive red roofs now only seen in the company logo.
I used to consider PJ junk food. Not great, but something you craved once and a while. Then I ate a bad one that gave me horrible heartburn. Now I can’t eat one without becoming nauseous.
Amen…as a native Chicagoan who has moved away, I’m constantly informing friends/co-workers that deep dish pizza is more of a tourist thing…the vast majority of pizza sold to locals is thin crust. With sausage…gotta have sausage on any Chicago pizza.
Defensive? Not that I can see. You were the person who said you had one experience with “NY Style” pizza and it sucked, so that was enough to put you off “NY Style” pizza.
For the record, I think plenty of places in this country have excellent …I guess we’ll call it pizza culture, and I don’t have a favorite among them. Favorite style, sure – thin crust, loads of mozzarella atop a not-sweet tomato sauce, blistered but not burnt crust… What’s not to like? That doesn’t mean other, vastly different interpretations of pizza aren’t also delightful.
As someone mentioned earlier, the general public has got used to “American” pizza, and that’s a shame. (Sadly, there are plenty of non-chain places in New York that lean heavily on that interpretation.)
As far as frozen pizzas go, CPK is actually one of the better ones, in my opinion. My favorite is Home Run Inn (a local restaurant that has a frozen version of their pizza. No idea how regional or not it is), then Palermo’s ultra thin crust, and CPK. All I prefer to Papa John’s.
I like Screamin’ Sicilian brand frozen pizza better than Papa John’s too. Plus you get a cardboard mustache you can stuff into your nostrils and look like an ethnic stereotype, until it gets too snotty and falls out.
Does Papa John’s give you that? NO! Not unless you cut your own mustache out of the box with scissors. No way I’m sticking that in my nose like a dork.
Round Table also has 3 locations in Hawaii, according to Google. I’ve been to the one in Waikiki.
And the sit-down video game consoles that had a uniform coating of pizza grease on all the controls. Oh, the memories…
Must have missed that when I Googled.
Eh, I disagree with the whole “It’s a tourist” thing. There’s now 5 Lou’s, 2 Gino’s, and I don’t know how many Giordano’s outside of the Loop/River North. Not to mention all of the small pizza places that also have deep dish. It’s time and labor intensive. They wouldn’t carry it if it was just a tourist thing. Chicagoans like deep dish pizza. But if we say “I want pizza tonight” without any qualifiers, it means thin crust.
