Cooking/ Pizza/ Recipes

Friday Night Slice: Whether You’re 8 or 38 Pizza

The crappy pizzas of childhood scar us all. Forgettable as they may be, greasy slapdash cardboard slices from Chuck E. Cheese or Peter Piper form our first experiences with pizza. They create the far end of your spectrum, so that when you come back to that end of the scale around 2 a.m. in your early 20s, you’ll know how bad that pizza is, even if you don’t care because its going to take the edge off a wicked hangover.

Most mark the milestones in their lives with places or people, but have you considered your personal pizza history?

Our formative pizza years, from the time your teeth come in to age 10, are a critical time. Two places stick in my mind from that era – Gianni’s in Monterey, California and Numero Uno, somewhere in LA. Gianni’s was a red-and-white-checked tablecloth joint and pizzas were slid onto aluminum pedestals at your table. Pizza for the most part was take-out food, so it was always a novelty to go sit in a restaurant and have the pizza brought to you. Gianni’s was a staple of childhood trips to Carmel. And Numero Uno, you probably know, the Chicago deep dish chain. It must have been at one of these two places that pepperoni, mushroom and olive came into play. Whether that’s true or not, from then on out, I got to call the pizza.

Whether crunchy-fried Pizza Hut or thick crust from Barro’s, the little hole-in-the-wall spot down the street from our house, or the big screen, after little-league pizza joint in the Mervyn’s mini-mall, the order was pepperoni, mushroom and olive. Now you know the real power of being an only child.

But then childlike things are left behind and the square pies of Little Caesar’s dominated my high school years. You could get two large pies (pizza, pizza!) for relatively cheap, so it inevitably turned up at every ASB event or practice.

College pizza, other than the random post-party slice, was Woodstock’s. With an inch and half wide ring of crust, it wasn’t cheap, but when I lived in the dorms, a medium pie was a splurge that could last a few meals. Sacrificing based on cost, pepperoni and green pepper made an appearance on my most common toppings list.

At my first real job, post-college, there was Extreme Pizza. When everyone else was doing the tech startup thing, a co-worker’s husband was starting up his own pizza chain. It was California pizza — the signature pies include Mr. Pestato Head with potatoes and pesto; Pandora’s Box, a Greek-inspired pizza with artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes; and Drag It Through the Garden, a veggie pie. Over the last 15+ years it’s grown into a multi-state chain.

Long after Domino’s ditched its 30-minute delivery guarantee, it became a Two-for-Tuesday regular at our place in LA. Pepperoni and green pepper; and pepperoni and mushroom. This is about the time I discovered all Domino’s pizza tastes the same because the sauce is over oregano’ed. It overpowers all else.

It’s supposed to be the old memories that dim with time, but right around here is where things get fuzzy. We’re living it, there’s too much happening pizza-wise to make sense of it. Neopolitan pies come on the scene, my mom gifts us a pizza stone and peel. Costco Pizza fits into the picture, but I can’t look at the right now and say there’s one pizza or one pizza place that is this phase in our lives. Village Host was a regular for us. Delancey is certainly on the list. More and more, it’s the pizza coming out of own kitchen that dominates the scene. And yet the old habits die hard. The past and present merge in a single pizza. This week’s Friday Night Slice is a classic: pepperoni, mushroom and olive.