Homa: Calzone

If I was a travel card I’d want to make sure I was valid in zones 1 – 'Cal'. ßWhat a shit opening joke. I was going to make a funny about the Kenny Loggins song, you know the one from Top Gun and substitute “Highway to the dangerzone” to “Highway to the calzone” but it didn’t have enough syllables and doesn't really work phonetically due to pronunciation issues. When it comes to shoddy puns about 80’s power pop let it never be said I’m not a stickler. I don’t imagine anyone has ever actually said the words “that Joe guy can't stickle for shit”, which I guess means people are abiding by my wishes. Thanks guys, let’s keep a lid on this ‘non-stickler’ nonsense. I don’t want to get some kind of reputation.

I like to think of calzones as the Italian Cornish pasty, in the sense that they are like a pastry parcel filled with lunch. It’s quite telling as to how much classier Italy is than Cornwall based on what constitutes ‘lunch’. In Cornwall you open up your pasty and you get a lump of ground up meat and carrots, in Italy you get tomato sauce, cheese, ham, mushrooms, a bit of basil, maybe some olive oil.  This comparison is basically a less funny and more specific version of Homer’s (the Greek poet) “White people have names like Lenny and black people have names like Carl” joke, except it would be “Italian people have things in their pasties like mozzarella and Cornish people have things in their pasties like mincemeat.”

Speaking of the famous yellow fat dudes, (not Jackie Chan you racist pig, he's not fat) these guys are pretty big fans of Homer, so much so they named the restaurant after him. However they obviously went over budget and could only afford an ‘A’ and not an ‘ER’ for the sign. I like this because it gives everything a bit of an urban edge. It’s basically a hip-hop/Simpsons themed restaurant. I went there once before, for brunch, but I just had a fry up, not pizza. If you’re the kind of person that has pizza for brunch then you’re sick and probably know where Maddie is.

8 out of 10