Pizza In The Sticks
Photo of Little Caesars in Canton, MI via Wikimedia Commons
When I was a kid back in Michigan all the way back in the 70s, pizza meant pretty much three things: Pizza Hut, Little Caesar’s, or Domino’s. Pizza Hut was the place you went if you wanted to eat out. The other two were the places that split friendships, families, and churches. Do you have Domino’s delivered to the house? Or do you drive to pick up Little Caesar’s?
Our family drove to Little Caesar’s. It was in a little strip mall called Something-or-other Plaza. (It was at Ford and Lilley Road, if you’re familiar with the area. It’s called Canton Corners now.) I made a comment to my parents about how Plazas must be the places where one buys Pizza and they thought that that was the most precocious thing they’d ever heard.
I now know better (even though that is something that SHOULD be true).
In any case, Friday nights meant getting some pizza at the plaza and going home and eating it in front of the television instead of eating it at the table.
We moved out to New York in the mid-80s and we found that there are MORE kinds of pizza than the chains. It’s apparently an “ethnic” food. Thus, we discovered foldable pizza. I gotta say, moving from Little Caesar’s special (with pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, peppers, and onions) to the much more minimalist New York Style pizza (cheese, a lotta herbs in the not-very-much sauce, maybe a topping, maybe not), I was surprised to find out that people not only preferred the minimalist, they saw Little Caesar’s as provincial.
Now I am older and wiser, Little Caesar’s no longer does the “Pizza! Pizza!” deal but is, instead, the grab-and-go $5 pizza chain. Pizza Hut is no longer the sit-down restaurant with the salad bar but the delivery and/or call and pick up place. Domino’s is running ads about how they do road repair.
And now there are little gourmet pizza places to free you from the corporate chains without throwing you at the minimalist foldable places. We can now go to the little artisanal hand-tossed pizza joint that lets you pick from 5 different sauces (I prefer the classic tomato with a spiral of pesto) and 6 different cheeses and you point to any of 30ish different ingredients to be sprinkled atop your pie. Personally, I am PRO-pineapple but only when paired with jalapeño, grilled onion, and artichoke hearts. Get the artisanal pepperoni and sausage and get a sprinkling of a 3-cheese blend of Asiago, Parmesan, and Romano to top it off and throw it in the wood-burning oven to give it an authentic roasted flavor.
And now the little artisinal pizza chains like Pie Five and Mod Pizza allow more and more people all over the country to enjoy what you once had to go to a dinky hole-in-the-wall in a hip city to enjoy.
You don’t even have to go to the plaza.
But, sometimes, I wander over to Little Caesars and pick up some Crazy Bread. It tastes like the 70’s in Michigan.
I’ve since remembered that we had one other “classy” option back in the 70’s. The Roman Forum.
It was a sit-down restaurant that specialized in bringing a big bowl of salad to the table and then bringing your pizza. It was dark enough to meaningfully have candles on the table. It felt like a grown-up place with grown-up food. Because they made you wait *FOREVER* and it was too dark to read. So you had to talk to each other.
I went back in 2010 or something like that to visit the family in Michigan and I told my mom “hey, lemme take you out to lunch there!” and we went back.
It was daytime so all of the lights were on. The booths were a little bit worse for wear than they were in the 70’s (and surely had been replaced/reupholstered a couple of times since).
But the salad tasted exactly the way it used to. The breadsticks tasted exactly the way they used to (and doubly so when dipped in the salad dressing). The pizza was a window back to decades before, and I was sitting at the Roman Forum with my family on a Friday night, when the lights were low.
Anyway, it’s closed now.Report
Aww.
The place for us, like that, was Roman Delight. Googling suggests that it’s moved out of the mall where we knew it (which also had a video arcade called “The Electric I”, which was rather high-toned for a place that had maybe twenty machines, but by god when I retire and start my own retro-style arcade it’s gonna be called that.) Longer parenthetical than the sentence there, that’s how I roll. Anyway, it’s somewhere in another mall now and maybe I could go, but…I dunno. Without scarfing down my chicken francaise or meatball pizza and then grabbing a five from dad to go play Arkanoid, it won’t be the same…Report
Pizza in the mall vs. pizza at the sit-down restaurant probably ought to be explored.
Sbarro was the only mall pizza, when I was a kid. I was vaguely offended by the name. Too many consonants in the wrong order. Eat the pizza then run down to Aladdin’s Castle and play Neogeo’s King of the Monsters.
But, by that point, I did some mental calculations and would rather spend the extra bucks in the arcade than on the slice/drink. Feed your head. So Sbarro got neglected.Report
Roman Delight covered a weird space by being a sit-down pizza restaurant…IN a mall. (This was a mall built before the invention of food courts–which, yes, that was a thing, I remember how amazing an innovation it was that a mall *had* a food court!)Report
Good stuff!
Our fancy pizza place was lit like that, a couple times a year we would drive 50 miles, the place was darkish as compared to others and the lights above the tables (if I recall correctly) were stained glass. The smell of fresh bread made your stomach growl as you entered the door. Always at least one gorgeous 20 something taking orders. The floors always looked too clean to walk on and my boots often had a light coat of red dust.
The cola was always served with a full measure of ice, and almost too cold to drink. There was that one time grandpa took the pepper shaker and shook about a half dollar sized share of pepper flakes and tossed them in his mouth, mistaking them for bacon bits. That’s when I knew I needed to start watching him a little bit, with all the new fangledness he was being exposed too.
That was Pizza Hut and it would be a long time until I knew much else. Didn’t try Little Caesars until after we moved south, now we have it once a month or so.Report
Back when they didn’t have free refills yet, but you could buy a pitcher.
“No ice, please.”Report
Heh… I wonder if we’re going look back on free refills like we were living in depression era depravity… I mean, given the ubiquitous HFC Biopumps we’ll all have – will deliver a perfectly optimized dose of HFC and Insulin to keep you balanced throughout the day. We’ll treat the pancreas like an appendix.Report
Gotta say, I’ve got a bolt-on artificial pancreas and it’s nowhere near as responsive and subtle as the real thing; you definitely want to keep that bad boy.Report
> I made a comment to my parents about how Plazas must be the places where one buys Pizza
I thought that myself as a child because I would conflate the word plaza with pizza. Same thing with “sign” and “sing”.
Also I never saw a Dominos or anything else until I was ten years old or thereabouts since I lived in a place with a fistful of mom-and-pop pizza joints. When I did order Domino’s for the first time, it was trash. Still is trash.
P.S. is there a way to only get notifications if someone replied to my comment only, rather than seeing everyone else’s threads blow up?Report
I’ll ask the grownups.Report
Unfortunately not. In the past we’ve had some plugins that have let us address-and-notify, but those stopped working and there is no replacement.
There are full-fledged replacement commenting systems I’ve looked at, but (a) they cost money and (b) I can’t get them working with the site (they do work, but something in the site breaks them).
I hope to be able to do this in the future though.Report
tahnk uReport