Good pizza is the veritible Food Of The Gods, and fit for the Mighty Unca Cecil Himself.
Bad pizza, though…the Horror! The Horror! :eek:
My worst pizza experience took place in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. At a Pizza Hut ™.
My folks & I were traveling, just a family road trip. We stopped for a Italian Sausage pizza. I need hardly add that this is nothing special in the way of an order. Eye-tye sausage is served everywhere; standard pizza parlour fare, especially at Pizza Hut™.
It took forever to arrive.
It looked funny when we got it.
It wasn’t Italian Sausage.
IT WAS FRIGGIN’ HOT DOGS!!! :mad:
Yes, that’s right. The swine had put hot dogs on pizza! And cheap hot dogs at that.
Without question, the worst excuse for a pizza I have ever encountered was at a Chuckie Cheese. Those of you who aren’t parents (or are smart enough to stay away) will have been spared, but Oh, the horror!
We aren’t regulars by any means (I can count on one hand the number of times we have been there), but after the first visit the rule was “we go there to play, we do not eat.”
Honestly folks. Get out of here. Rather, come here, to NYC. Then, anywhere you go, you can say, “Uck! This is the worst pizza ever! Nothing like what they have in NYC.”
So far, everywhere i’ve been, the pizza has sucked major moth balls. I grew up in Brooklyn and pretty much the entire NYC area, and nothing compares to the pizza here. Tried it in Ohio, PapaJohns, hated it, in DC at several places in Adams Morgan, hated it, any Domino’s, hated chucky cheese, hated it in California anywhere i went. And the funniest thing of all is, anywhere there was a place that boasted it had “New York style pizza”, it was worse than ever. Ugh!
Think i’ll go have some for lunch now. later!
Up front, I acknowledge that a LOT has changed in Ireland in the past 25 years. Ireland has a large, young, sophisticated, well-educated population that is no longer isolated from the rest of the world. (Even small country stores in Ireland now sell woks!)
However, when I was a kid, my family often spent the summer in Ireland, and the food was wretched! Boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage and cold baked beans are NOT my idea of a great dinner, nor is rhubarb pie a yummy dessert. Indeed, the summers I spent in Ireland were the only time I was at my ideal weight, because there was nothing decent in the country to eat.
ANyway, in the town of Tralee, back in the summer of 1974, we spotted a little joint advertising “pizza,” and I was deliriously happy, thinking “REAL FOOD AT LAST!” The stuff I ate, however, was wretchedly bad. The Irishwoman running the place had no idea what pizza was supposed to be- she just tossed a few lumps of muenster cheese and some scraps of pork fat and lettuce on dough, baked it and called it pizza.
BARF!
Now, in the meantime, everything has changed in Ireland- they have every ethnic food imaginable, so they probably have some very good pizza joints now (along with a lot of AWFUL chains, like Pizza Hut).
Recently, before an Orioles game at the Yard in Baltimore, my uncle and I stopped at a little pizza shop on Pratt Street, between all of the bars that cater to O’s fans. The pizza was so bad I couldn’t even finish it, despite how hungry I was. Clumps of cheese on cardboard. Yecch.
My worst pizza experienece, oddly enough, was in Italy. You see, I’m a mildly observant Jew, which means I keep kosher but I don’t make a career out of it. I won’t eat bacon or a chheseburger, but if the steak’s good I won’t ask what;s in the sauce. Anyway, four years ago I spent a few days in Florence, Italy. One evening, hungry from a few hours of sightseeing, I decided to test the local pizza. I bought a perfectly normal, plain looking slice from a street vendor an dug in. Three bites later, I noticed a strange, un-pizza-like flavor, and I decide to examine my dinner a bit closer. To my immense displeasure, I discovered a large slice of some unidentified meat hiding betwixt sauce and cheese - meat which I had eaten of. If you have a problem imagining my distress, think of a vegetarian finding chicken in his egg salad. I tossed the offending pie to the nearest trashcan and went to look for a MacDonald’s.
Listen, Italians, I know you invented the damn food, but I want to see what I’m eating. A pizza should be designed with dough on the bottom, then tomato sauce, then cheese, and then any other form of foodstuff you wish to add. That’s the only way to do it. The light of day must shine upon my pizza.
BTW, soulsling, where’s the best pizza in eastern Brooklyn? I need to know.
Alessan, Itlains invented the food here in the USA. Not in Italy. In eastern Brooklyn, i’m not so sure, i now the brownstone area better for pizza, especially Bay Ridge. Goodfellas on 3rd Ave is good, Ucellis on Berry and N.6th St., pretty much anywhere in Brooklyn is decent though, better than outside the city. Right by the Sheepshead Bay stop on the D train is a good place, but i forget the name of it, it’s by my dads Auto-Repair shop on Y and 16. I like the pizza there.
Soulsling, I know your pain. I recently moved from Brooklyn to Asscrack Massachusetts. Pizza here is disgusting. Italian sausage? They’ve never heard of such a thing. You can get chorizo on your pizza, but who the hell wants that? Blech. Calzone? What’s that? There is one chain here in town where I can manage to choke down a slice called Papa Gino’s, but I have to be really desperate.
BTW, you think out of town pizza is bad? Try the Chinese food. They make something here in Asscrack called chow mein, but it isn’t like any chow mein I have ever seem. It comes with brown gravy. Brown gravy like you would serve with roast beef! Talk about disgusting.
I miss New York
Rose
Blue Twylight, last time i was in Boston, i found one place that was slightly decent for pizza by UMASS somewhere. The slices were too big and sloppy though, and i was recovering from a party the night before, so anything was good at that point. My condolences to you oh beautiful lost woman in distant pizzaless land. Thanks for preparing me for the chinese food though, i’m headed that way soon to visit some friends, i’ll steer clear of any pizza and chinese joints.
whew At least I’m not the only one who’s had bad Italian pizza. (Pizza was invented in Italy, but it was more like a quiche until the Americans got a hold of it during the World Wars. The quintessential Italian pizza is a margherita - tomatoes and cheese.) I had a margherita in Venice at this little place called Il Grotto, decorated like a cave and air-conditioned. The latter was the main reason we chose to eat there. It was a truly disgusting experience. The crust had a suspicious taste of burned cardboard, the cheese was greasy and fell off upon cutting it, and the tomato sauce was tomato paste with huge chunks of tomato floating in it. I won’t get started on the $3 Cokes.
I’m not sure this counts, but I vote for the “pizza” Northwest Airlines serves on their transatlantic flights. It comes in a microwaveable plastic bag, with the plastic and the cheese melted into each other, and the crust bears an alarming resemblance to a bath sponge. Ugh.
I have to join robinh and vote for Chuckie Cheeses. Most unbelievably horrible shit on crust anywhere. It’s only pizza, how could they screw it up so bad?
When I was in college, my roommate and I ordered pizza pretty frequently - and her favorite place had the WORST pizza I’ve ever had. It tasted about like they’d smeared ketchup on the box and topped it with rancid American cheese. After one time of trying it, I decided to just pay for my own pizza fromt hen on.
Chuck E Cheese’s? :mad: Don’t get me started! That hellhole doesn’t even serve real food. It serves pure fat on cardboard. And the atmosphere is akin to a riot in munchkinland. I usually can tolerate little kids, and I even enjoy watching them if there’s nothing else to do. But Chuck E Cheese’s seems to create an atmosphere of complete hell with its stupid games, awful attempts at humor everywhere, etc. Needless to say, I was dragged there more than once by people I was obligated to follow. Horrible place. I hope each one of them burns to the ground.
Getting away from my rant (sorry to all those subjected to it), Domino’s is one pizza place I refuse to ever buy food from. On more than one occasion the pizza has been nice and hot in the outside but almost cold in the center. The damn thing was nearly raw! Pizza Hut is actually good, but I’m about as much a food critic as the average Muscae is (that’s housefly for the rest of you). BTW, don’t knock calzones. They actually taste great if they’re done right.
Soulsling: Thanks for confirming what I have always suspected - California is a vast wasteland of crappy pizza.
The worst of the worst is Chucky Cheese and Pizza Hut, which seems universal.
