Thursday, February 24

Update on sketchy pizza place



It turns out that the sketchy pizza place I blogged about last time was fairly good.  It wasn't awesome, but it wasn't as bad as I feared.  I liked the cheese and gyro meat and the only real complaint I had was that it wasn't even a little bit crispy  Ian, my pizza BFF, wrote up the whole thing here.

Tuesday, February 15

Ghost of Pizzas Future

I'm dreading my next pizza adventure.  I just have an instinct about this place that says that if we come out of this without food poisoning we'll be lucky.

First, the place does pizza, pasta, wings, indian, and chinese food.  Whenever I see a menu that large my first thought is that I need to pick whatever food gets ordered the most.  I know they're not busy enough to actually keep all of those things prepared and fresh, which means that things are sitting around or everything's frozen.  It could mean both.  I'm more scared of the sitting around prospect.  I can't see their kitchen, I have no idea if they have this vat of the least popular soup that just gets reheated every day.  At the movie theater where I used to work we would cook the hot dogs, put them in the bun, wrap them in the foil, and at the end of the night throw away the bun and foil and put the hot dogs back in the fridge to get reheated the next day.  I saw hot dogs that had been reheated for more than one day.  They were gray and wrinkled.  Whenever I go to restaurants I'm always terrified that I've ordered the "movie theater hot dog" item.  With a huge menu, there's no guarantee that everything on there isn't like that.  How do I find the safe items?

Second, there's some saying about finding what you're good at and doing it well.  I am highly skeptical that they are good at pizza, pasta, wings, Indian, AND Chinese food.  They're probably good at none of them.  I challenge you to show me one restaurant that does a little bit of everything that is good at all of it.

Luckily I'm only getting the pizza and it's only one meal.  Am I being unreasonable for thinking this place is sketchy?

Friday, February 11

Socializing Cranky

I'm not very well socialized.  I'm like the dog at the shelter who acts all depressed because no one will play with it but it's my own damn fault because I spend all of my time in the part of the cage that they can't reach, but when someone takes me out of the cage I jump all over them because I don't know how to get in that middle place with the tail wagging but without the licking.

This has to do with pizza, I swear.  Not the being weird part, the socializing.

Last night I went to a local meetup tweetup thing and I found myself talking about pizza a lot.  It's not that I don't like talking about pizza, I just hate feeling like I'm marketing myself.  It's a place filled with marketing and PR people and they're pretending to be interested in what I'm saying (and maybe they are) and yet I still feel weird.  Perhaps it's because I won't even feign reciprocity.  I don't care who they market for, I'm not their next client; even when I do get a pizzeria, I doubt I'll be hiring a marketing firm.

I think from now on when people ask me why my tag says Pizza Girl, I'm just going to shrug and say I like pizza.

Eh, maybe I'm just being cranky this morning.  I did actually find a couple of interesting people to follow on Twitter, so I can't complain too much.

Wednesday, February 9

Blue (Bleu?) Cheese and Fruit


I had a blue (bleu?) cheese pizza last night that didn't make me want to hurl.  I really detest blue cheese.  It smells like feet (I will not be licking your feet either!) and gets up under my fingernails when I have to dig it out of the container to make a blue cheese pizza.  I realize that there are people out there who smell it and think "yum, my kind of feety mildew".

Eryn at work has been trying to get a fruit pizza on the menu for a while.  Breaking onto the menu isn't an easy thing.  First, we're not in charge of recipes whatsoever.  We have no say.  Second, even the people who are in charge of recipes take months to settle on the right combination of toppings.

Eryn made a pizza last night that was apple slices, fresh mozzarella, blue cheese (she was thinking Gorgonzola but blue is what we have available at the restaurant), freshly cracked black pepper, crushed walnuts, and honey (drizzled on top after it came out of the oven).  I agreed to try a slice despite my misgivings about the stinky blue stuff.

It wasn't bad at all.  The consistency of the blue cheese was nice (I suppose that I never really thought much about the texture of it because my senses were distracted with not thinking about cleaning out months old tupperware containers that had been lost to the back of the refrigerator).  In fact, I would probably maybe order it off the menu.

I wish her good luck in getting it approved.