Who doesn’t like good pizza? Delicious mozzarella that stretches as you pull the slice from your mouth. Sauce from the finest Roma tomatoes plucked from the storied shadows of Mount Vesuvius. Flavor-packed pepperoni cups, each like a salty little kiss from Santa Maria herself. There is simply no greater pleasure.
Anyway, don’t expect that stuff here.
Remember when you lived in the city? The hustle and bustle infiltrated every cell in your body. You even had a MetroCard. Then you moved here. You gave up. I will not reward that kind of mediocrity. You’re lucky I even stay open. If I weren’t locked into another four years of local Little League sponsorship, I would’ve left you strip-mall regulars in the dust years ago. The pizza I will make is the pizza that best matches my assessment of you and your choices. It is barely adequate.
Our cheese comes from a large plastic bag labeled with a picture of another plastic cheese bag. The sauce is one dimensional, infected with an impossible amount of years-old dried oregano. In the short journey from the oven to your plate, my pies will turn stale. None of this is accidental; it took weeks of sleepless nights in our test kitchen to figure out how to do this.
It’s not like I don’t know what good pizza should taste like or how to make it. I completed a residency in Mozzarella Studies at the Conservatory in Napoli. I have a masters in applied dough theory from Oberlin. My nonna gave birth to my papá in a pizza restaurant during the Feast of San Gennaro. My veins run thick with marinara. Only instead of salt that marinara is seasoned with contempt.
When you do order from us—and you will—you’ll have to order by phone. The whole time, you’ll wonder why nobody asks for useful information like your contact number or address. We’ll tell you “twenty minutes” as I hold in my laughter and high-five our delivery guy. If it does arrive, you’ll eat it, unconvincingly telling your loved ones that it tastes just like the pizza at Bleecker Street pizzeria in the city. Only you’ll know it tastes more like Bleecker Street, the street in the city.
This is an impossible situation I have engineered masterfully, fueled entirely out of spite for you and the other rubes in this town.
Here’s the thing, though: you’ll do it all again next week. You’ll get home from work exhausted, too late to make anything for the family. You’ll ask your kids what they want, and they’ll predictably say “pizza” because they don’t know any better. They’re naïve, stupid even. I did that to them.
It’s not like you can do anything about it. Sure, you can run across the road and try a slice from Gino’s on Main Street or Roma Pizza II, also on Main Street. They despise you even more than I do. Or even better, go next door to the Chinese-Japanese-Thai-Turkish fusion restaurant and play Russian roulette with your digestive tract. But you should know, they don’t have a bathroom, and ours is for paying customers only.
Your situation is entirely hopeless. Don’t try to make your own, don’t order from the next town over, don’t even make a pizza bagel. Do what you always do: give up. So just join your peers and submit to my will once and for all. The sooner you do that, the sooner I’ll grant you access to our weekly Two-for-Tuesday Mozzarella Sticks Special. They’re terrible.