Today I had a colleague in from another city to do some work. Asking him what he wanted for lunch he said ". . . some really great pizza . . ." so I thought back to some friends of mine who dine here and love it. A quick phone call to the store and lunch was ordered. I asked the woman taking my order if they had 20 oz sodas in bottles to which she said yes so we added two Sprites on the tab and waited on time to pick it up.
When I arrived I provided the gentleman at the counter my name and watched as he slapped my pizza and two fountain drinks on the counter telling me it would be $25 and change. I told the gentleman I needed the bottled sodas and advised him when I ordered I asked the woman if they had 20 oz bottles and she said yes. The guy told me all they had was two-liters and cans and promptly gave me two cans in place of the non-existent 20 oz bottles; both of which were sticky and had to be wiped off after getting them back to the office. I guess there wasn't a price difference for the smaller quantity cans . . . or maybe the sticky cans cost extra.
Sadly this was the best part of my "upper crust" experience. Full disclosure, I'm a fat guy that loves his pizza so I eat it . . . a lot. There are few meals I enjoy more than a few slices of delicious hot pizza loaded with flavorful toppings and a thin tasty crust. Today was not an enjoyable lunch. In fact, I can honestly say that I've had more flavorful and better textured pizza from the freezer section in a grocery store. I would have preferred hitting one of the 2 - 3 stop & rob gas stations on the way here and made do with whatever pizza they had in their lunch counter hot box.
The crust was covered in a thin layer of gritty flour and had no taste what-so-ever. It was like eating a stale cracker . . . and not a good cracker like a Ritz, but those nasty ones you get in MRE packets. Better yet, look up how to make your own hard tack and whip yourself up a batch and you'll understand what I'm talking about. Oops, did I just give away their dough recipe?
The sauce was not much better. It tasted like a mouthful of canned tomato paste with no seasoning. I expected some spice from the sausage, but there was little (if any) flavor to it at all and, to make it worse, it was very greasy. The cheese was hot and there was a lot of it. That's it, that's the best thing I can say about the cheese on my pizza . . . it was hot and there was a lot of it. Perhaps to try to add a little flavor to it, someone had dumped what looked like a bunch of canned Italian seasoning on top. I shouldn't complain about that though because at least it had some zest and texture to it. The mushrooms tasted like mushrooms . . . a fungus, but one I admittedly enjoy. All-in-all, if not for the fungus and the boot leg Mrs. Dash poured all over the pie it would have been completely without merit.
Now here I sit, embarrassed in from of my colleague, mad at my friends for giving me such an obviously flawed account of how good this pizza is (maybe it was a late "April Fools" day prank on their part), and just under $30 lighter in the wallet for something that we threw half of away. Lesson learned though, next time I'll skip the wanna-be Red Baron and take my co-workers out to Giordano's when they want some really good pizza.