Chicago Town: Ltd Edition X-Factor Takeaway Pizza

Just in case you never talk to anyone ever, sprint past tabloid stands with your eyes shut and the only time you leave your sealed-off, soundproofed cave is to go to the frozen food section of Sainsbury's, Chicago Town have kindly come up with a pizza to remind you that it's X-Factor time. Unsurprisingly it's an unhealthy, artificial cheesefest, and the pizza's not great either. Zing! How do you like those apples Slime-on Bowel? 

I never really understood that phrase, because I like really apples. I'd probably put them in my top three fruits of all time, along with mangoes and satsumas. (I find oranges too much hassle to peel and they're too big whereas satsumas are kind of like natures fun size Mars Bars; way more manageable). Point being, if somebody asked me how I liked those apples, chances are I'd probably say something like "yes, they were delicious, thank you" which would no doubt lead to an awkward silence. 

This pizza was kind of boring. I usually like Chicago Town but this one was just a bit "meh", less a pizza, more of a pizzzza. I think I need to start branching out into more interesting pizza places in London. If you've got any suggestions then please, by all means, suggest away, because this guy left the mustard as uncut as a DVD rerelease of Cannibal Holocaust. 

4 out of 10

Chicago Town 'Knork'

If you buy four packs of Chicago Town Deep Dish pizzas, cut out the tokens on each one and send them off to Chicago Town (the company, not the city) a few days later a Knork will arrive. Too much hassle? You can always take the more practical route of starting a god-awful pizza blog in the vain hope that a nice lady at Chicago Town will read it, pray for your swift death by heart failure and send you something to make the shovelling of pizza into your mouth all the more efficient.

At least that's what happened to me. I have four tokens sitting on my desk that I was going to send off but the big CT beat me to it. A 'Knork', for those that don't know, or more likely, don't care, is half KNife, half fORK. I suspect what they've done, and I can't be sure, is combine the two halves of both words. I guess they didn't go for 'Fife' because sex sells and men (and lesbians, it is 2010) might send off for a Knork hoping to get a parcel containing a single, solitary boob.

I'd say it's more fork than knife. That is to say, were I to try and mug Crocodile Dundee with my Knork and have him disparage the knife-ness of my Knork by demonstrating how much more knife-y his knife was I'd have a hard time disagreeing with him.

They sent me a three page press release with my Knork, detailing how revolutionary my new Knork will be to my life. Obviously they are right, because it is. I now think of my life as having two separate eras: pre-Knork and post-Knork, and in my head, everything pre-Knork is grey. They also go on about how great Chicago Town Deep Dish pizzas are but my favourite bit is at the end where they say "available in all major supermarkets... and Iceland."* 

*I added the ellipsis for comic effect, they didn't put that in but they should have. I don't think I've ever been in an Iceland, but then I am very middle-class. 

Chicago Town 'Edge to Edge' New York Deli

I've come up with, what I feel, would be a rather good advertising campaign for this pizza. Basically U2, the band, have finished doing a concert or whatever and their guitarist or bassist, (I neither know nor care), 'The Edge' walks over to a pizza and picks up a slice. He's about to eat it when he is hit over the head by a steel chair. It is revealed that the wrestler 'Edge' really wants the pizza and takes it from 'The Edge's' unconscious hand. I like this idea because it's a visual metaphor for the name of the pizza as it shows the pizza's passing from 'Edge to Edge'.  Plus watching members of U2 getting hit with stuff would never get old.

This pizza hates crusts. It's crustist. I think I agree, I might be a closet crustist. I'm not one of those losers that leaves a plate full of crusts, but I think I eat them just so people don't think of me as a crust-leaving loser. Is that bad? Should I stick to my guns and just leave the crust and not a give a shit what anyone else thinks? Maybe if I say I'll only leave unnecessarily fat crusts, but is that too much of a compromise on my crust policy? Should I maintain my integrity and leave all crusts, regardless of size?

What a dilemma!

6.5 out of 10

(%) PIZZA FIGHT! (%)

Chicago Town Deep Pan Pepperoni  VS. Chicago Town BBQ Chicken 

Woah. Pizza fight! How exciting. I thought just reading about me eating pizza might've been getting a little stale so I'm shaking things up with the welcome introduction of some cheese and tomato violence. Now these pizzas didn't have a fight in the traditional sense. I guess it wasn't really a fight, more a competition, but either way there were a lot of bad vibes. If they hadn't have been so busy being digested these pizzas would have totally snubbed each other at the end-of-game hand shake.

Because I'm an idiot and didn't think it through the photos above don't really give you any idea of the scale of these dudes. You'll have to take my word for it when I say this battle was the pizza equivalent of David and Goliath. The pepperoni guy was a fat hulk of a pizza, and the chicken dude was just a frail, prepubescent, sissy pizza.

I've never invested too much time into the whole bible thing. It's really long and someone spoiled the end for me, (he comes back to life), but there's actually some truth in there, at least if the David and Goliath chapter is anything to go by. Turns out the big one was too stodgy but the little guy had just the right amount of stodge. Way to go God. Good call.

If you're a total heathen and the biblical analogy is a bit too righteous for you then think of it like this: If Chicago Town pizzas were alcoholic spirits, a shot's manageable, but trying to drink a pint glass of gin would be pretty hard work.

Goodfella's Pepperoni Pocco

What's a Pocco? I don't know. I'm assuming it's Italian for 'mini-pizza' because it said Pocco on the box and there were mini-pizzas in the box. Seems logical enough but I thought I better check before, God forbid, I make a sweeping cultural assumption. On the Goodfella's website there isn't anything about them.* What's stranger is that if you type 'Pocco' into an Italian-English translator nothing comes out. It's almost as if they don't exist...

If they don't and I just imagined it then I have quite a tasty imagination. However, and I understand this is quite a silly criticism for a mini-pizza, it was a bit small. Now I know this is like complaining about a horror film by saying "It was good, but too scary" or jazz music by saying "it's all over the place, there's no tune" but this pizza didn't last long enough. Chicago Town have their mini-pizza size down to a T, although I do usually eat two of those at a time.

Actually scratch that, that's a perfectly acceptable criticism of jazz. I hate jazz. Jazz is rubbish. This pizza, fictional or not, was way better than jazz.

7 out of 10

*Don't worry, I've sent an e-mail to Goodfella's notifying them of this. I'll let you know how that goes down/if they send me free pizzas.