Panning Pizza

Tonight, I ate the worst pizza I have consumed thus far in this century.

The source of the disastrous pizza? Chicago Pizza, a new restaurant that opened a month or so ago at the corner of E. Piedmont and Roswell in Marietta. I should have been alerted to potential problems by their inability to do something as advertise properly; their first ad had no phone number or address on it, and their second ad had the wrong phone number.

Nevertheless, I have fond memories of real Chicago style pan pizza (love Pizzeria Uno, of which there are none in Atlanta, alas), so Susan and I figured we'd give it a try.

The place looks good; nicely decorated, spacious, clean, appealing. Oh, but what they pass off as pizza...

If you bought a slab of day-old foccaccia bread, baked out any remaining moisture, then carefully arranged two nuggets of Italian sausage, two pieces of pepperoni, three our for diced bits of green pepper, and two or three mushroom slices atop a layer of cheese so thin you'll need a micrometer to measure properly, then you too could open a Chicago Pizza franchise. I have never paid so dearly for so little pizza atop so much bread. Price isn't really a problem, though; there is no price low enough to make it worth buying this instead of pizza.

Sometimes I wonder why we feel that need to search for the holy grail of pizza--the perfect pie. We have some excellent places nearby (Zappoli's, Bellacino's, and Godfathers certainly qualify, while G'Angelo's would make that list if they could only find a source for Italian sausage that had any flavor at all). I guess it's that idea that the pizza is always pizza-ier on the other side... but in this case, hardtack with jerky would have been comparable.

I allow myself pizza once a week in moderation; I only regret that I wasted a pizza week on this stuff...