I love pizza, any time pizza is available I say hell yeah pizza, because pizza is never bad… until it is… and last night I had bad pizza.
This pizza was supplied by a friend, it was just a basic cheese pizza, I don’t know where this pizza came from, I only know it was frozen (plenty of frozen pizzas are good, I don’t knock it for that), and it was cooked plenty enough, but the taste that filled my mouth told me this wasn’t pizza. This was science gone wrong. I couldn’t figure out what the taste was exactly, but I knew I could not eat more than one bite. Not even a full slice!! What the hell is that?? It’s PIZZA, it’s not rocket science, how do you screw up pizza?
Anyway, you had bad pizza before? It seems very hard to do to the point where I never thought I would.
I have had plenty of bad pizzas. In fact, a few months ago one beat Papa John’s as the worst pizza I’ve ever ordered. Out of curiosity and the sheer novelty of it, I decided to order pizza from 7/11 and watch Morbius on the Internet Archive. The movie was dreadful, and the pizza was doughy and chemical-tasting.
It doesn’t even freeze properly. A whole day in the freezer, and I had to shove the whole fucking pizza in the oven because it was still too soft to break individual pieces from. And not that it would surprise anyone, but this pizza tasted just as awful as the first one.
I live in a place where there is good pizza. I’ve been to plenty of places outside of where I live that have bad pizza. The worst I’ve had? Boston. Never had a good pizza in Boston.
I have been known to make “Emergency Pizza” for lunch. This is where you see only a few pieces of bread left, and like, a small amount of marinara from spaghetti the other night and you might have some cheese left. You put it on a baking sheet and throw it under the broiler. It’s kinda bad but it gets the job done.
“Emergency Pizza” is another food in my series of “{adjective} {name of food}” foods. I also sometimes make “Healthy Nachos”. They aren’t healthy, they’re just regular nachos…
usually, when someone says something tastes like cardboard, i think they’re exaggerating, but one time, when my dad took our family to a pizza place he went to as a kid, and i bit into the pizza, i suddenly realized that food really could taste like cardboard. (after the rest of my family also voiced their dislike of it, my dad said something like “i guess it never was very good”)
I think there a lot of injustice in the world, and pizza is no stranger to it. These are some perturbing pizza pitfalls:
5 Cheese pizzas are usually a bad idea, you lose the complexity of individual cheeses for a pile of dairy. Especially bad when it includes Cheddar or an earthy goat cheese.
Vegan meats are risky - these are often too dry for a pizza
Pizza crusts that are too oily / weak constitution. Especially when cut into sad floppy squares without a crust.
Comical amounts of toppings. This is usually a sign of a non-confident chef trying to overcompensate.
Fish/shrimp on pizza. I’m neutral on clams as not to offend new englanders.
Have to disagree with that, simply as my favourite pizzer (had to) is one with anchovies and capers. Simple, tasty and because most people I know don’t like anchovies I don’t have to share it! Having had one by the sea once, with fresh anchovies on it, I can say for me at least, that’s as good as it gets in the pizza world!
The only injustice on a pizza is stuffing anything in a crust. Crusts should be small and used just for holding the pizza and if feeling wild, eating afterwards.
deep respect for the amount of choice you spent on choosing to probably have a bad time.
i have absolutely had bad pizza. “Neapolitan” style that was a watery slop flop. frozen stuff that was just various rubbery textures on top of each other. it’s out there! watch yourselves
Back in 2016 I got off a trans-Atlantic flight to Chicago. After spending an entire day at the airport, an entire night on the plane and then dealing with customs, with my anxiety on top of that, I was absolutely exhausted. My friends from Sweden who had arrived a week earlier pick me up and go off to get dinner. Mind you, at this point my internal clock is like 3 in the morning or something, and I’ve already had dinner twice, both before and during the plane. So I’m just kinda hazily going with the flow.
I get dragged off to some diner joint and urged to have Chicago style pizza. I have no idea what the hell Chicago style pizza is. The American guy showing me and my friends around orders in a whole Chicago pizza, however since we are a group, he decides on a quite unusual compromise – he orders pizza without any toppings, because “it’s easier than deciding something everyone wants”.
So we just get this big tomato pie monstrosity; a crust bowl of runny tomato sauce. I get one slice. I’m not particularly hungry. I’m really tired. However I also have a good ability of shoving basically any food into my mouth, and I’m overly polite. So I eat it all, and I probably get handed a slice or two more, I don’t remember. I’m suffering. It’s just tomato sauce. Runny tomato sauce and some morsels of bread crust. Now I don’t have anything against tomatoes, but I kinda prefer food to have, like, contrast. I should’ve just gotten a spoon and had it like soup, or thrown some pasta in there. It would’ve felt more appropriate. However, somehow this was technically pizza. Abysmal. The worst pie I’ve ever had.
I once saw one of those dumb food network lists of the top 100 pizza places in the US or whatever. I scanned for my city and found exactly one place on the list. Having had a lot of pizza in this town, I was surprised that I hadn’t even heard of it. They said in the blurb that everyone in the city would know this place. I asked around and no one had heard of it.
I ordered a pizza. It was burnt black on the bottom over 80% of the crust. Was it inedible? No, but the whole situation made me defiantly angry
That reminds me of something I discovered earlier today: Dino’s Tomato Pie. Now by “discovered”, I really mean “saw the 90s-ass web layout over Discord”, and out of curiosity, I decided to see whether the restaurant is still around today and what its pizza was like. In order: they are still around, and there’s a sizeable number of one star reviews on Google complaining about the burnt pizza and bad customer service. In fact, something I only just spotted looking those reviews up again for this thread:
