The Old Angel: Pizza Burger

I liked this guy. I had the option of getting curly fries with him, but for some reason I chose wedges. I don't know why. I wish I'd chosen curly fries, I love them and I think I must have forgotten I love them. For me, curly fries still seem like some kind of exotic, exciting treat that you only have on special occasions, like the last day of school before summer or at some rich kid's twelfth birthday party. I'm talking about this all retrospectively of course, about curly fries evoking a sense of nostalgia; as in 'going to children's birthday parties when I was also a child', not going to them now I'm a hairy grown-up. I don't go to the birthday parties of twelve year old's anymore, (they've stopped inviting me, the little shits). I'm going to give this pizza credit simply for having curly fries as an option, regardless of whether I had them or not.

I know the picture's a bit crap but have you noticed something odd about this pizza? Something peculiar that you can't quite put your finger on, something that sets it apart from all the other pizzas on this blog. Like the others it had tomato puree and cheese, ingredients traditionally essential for something to qualify as a pizza, but something's still not quite right, so what could it be?... 

SPOILER ALERT

It's not a pizza you dummy, it's a burger! You see how it says 'Pizza Burger' up there and how the photo is a photo of a burger and not a pizza? See how all the little clues come together? Like the second time you saw The Sixth Sense, or the first, depending on how old you are, it suddenly seems so obvious. I hope I haven't made you feel like a schmuck with this shocking twist. Don't feel bad if I have, I got outsmarted by a postbox the other day and had to go ask the lady in the post office what to do. 

8 out of 10

Rescue Rooms: BBQ

If you live or have ever lived in Nottingham then skip this paragraph because this will all be old news. If you haven't lived there skip it anyway because it's going to be boring. Rescue Rooms is a bar and venue that has a small kitchen that sporadically churns out pizzas. On most of their clubnights they sell massive slices for a pound that, like an insecure fat woman, are big, sloppy and fall apart if you try to pick them up. During the day however you can get a whole, real-life sized pizza all to yourself, which is what I did.

I like pizza as a party food, especially at £1 a slice. Pretty girls and cheap pizza lead to the video below happening on an almost hourly basis. To such an extent that now a group of Korean (at least please) 18 year olds thrusting pizza and god knows what else in my direction means eyelids barely get batted and pulses stay at a consistently unimpressed rate.


Anyway, as usual this is irrelevant because the pizza I had was eaten at a far more respectable hour and I was barely drunk or anything. It was BBQ and had chicken on I think, I can't remember, it was a while ago. You can get 2 for 1 on Sundays or something unless they've closed the kitchen, which they may have done considering, as I said, it was a few weeks ago I ate this. A lot can happen in a few weeks. I remember that the cheese could have been a bit better. High quality cheese never hurt anyone, except the livelihood of cheap cheese farmers who have to be laid off because of plummeting business. Wizard of Soz cheap cheese farmers, don't hate the player etc.

7 out of 10

Zizzi's: Mare E Monti

My Grandad came to visit me the other day, I think it was because I recently graduated from Uni and am now a real-life, grown-up adult man with responsibilities and duties and shit. If this was the case I should think about graduating more often because if I got a pizza like this every time it would be totally worth it. I didn't go to my actual graduation ceremony. I don't really understand why anyone would. I've had this conversation with a few people about my controversial stance on this issue so forgive me if I'm sounding like a grumpy, broken record. Basically if I wanted to pay £100+* to the institution that I'd spent the past three years paying over £10,000 to for about four hours a week of their time, just so I could sit through a three-hour ceremony where I applaud hundreds of people I don't know for getting qualifications that only they, and the forty other job applicants waiting in the company lobby will have, then it would suggest I hadn't been so educated after all.

Do you hate it when people have a rant and then say "rant over" like it's not obvious that it's over because they've stopped ranting? I do. You wouldn't do that for anything else. Like if you said "What do you call a Mexican victim of car theft? Carlos." and then felt you had to say "joke over" just in case people were still waiting for a punchline. But that rant, and this minor rant about rant closure policies are both, mercifully, over. Back to the pizza! (starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd.)

Mare E Monti means 'Sea and Mountains', which almost makes sense as this was half courgette and prawns and half spicy sausage. Prawns definitely live in the sea but I'm not so sure about pigs living in mountains, but then you do get goats in mountains so what do I know? Well, when it comes to the average altitude of a pig's natural habitat, apparently not much. To anyone reading this in search of juicy pig trivia I can only apologise and ask that next time, could you perhaps misspell 'pig' three times less drastically. Anyway the pizza was really good, and quite big and had dollops of creme fraiche and I almost couldn't finish it. Obviously I could finish it and did, but it was less of a walkover than usual. Take that, my ever-diminishing chances of a healthy adulthood.

9 out of 10

* Three tickets: £75, hat and gown rental: £30, hotel room for the parents: £50, photo of you dressed like a tit holding a piece of paper: meaningless.

Bella Italia: Carne Mista

I've only been to Bella Italia once before. It was when I was about twelve and I went with my Dad and all I remember is my Dad getting angry with the waiting staff because they kept asking us if we had finished our meal when we obviously hadn't. I don't think we left a tip. So with such a troubled history I was understandably hesitant about whether they'd remember and spit in my pizza and make jokes from the kitchen about my new haircut. It's really short so I was thinking they would be little digs about me looking like a U.S. marine. "Here's your pizza sir, hoo-rah!" and so forth. Witty kitchen bastards.

I went for the Carne Mista. I haven't checked and I won't because I'm sure I'm wrong but wouldn't be be great if, in English, Carne Mista meant Mr. Meat? It would be totally appropriate because this pizza had a modest zoo worth of animals on. All dead obviously. Don't worry, one of my pizza comrades had one coated in vegetables so it all balances out karma wise.

Dare I say it but it might have been a bit too meaty, perhaps a little plant life would have balanced out all the death. My other pizza buddy had the right idea, a bit of meat AND a bit of veg. Radical thinking from her there, well done.

8 out of 10

Fire & Stone: Bombay

Fire & Stone is a pizza restaurant in Oxford. I think they have one in Covent Garden and Portsmouth as well but who's ever been to Portsmouth? I know I haven't, at least I don't think I have. Actually maybe I have been to Portsmouth. Yep, to get a ferry to the Isle of Wight when I was younger, I'm sorry, I lied. So in answer to my own question: who's been to Portsmouth? I have. Have you? Don't worry about answering, I honestly don't care!

Fire & Stone's menu is divided into six sections, one for each continent. And I do know there are seven continents but they leave out Antarctica because coming up with Antarctica-themed pizzas would be tricky. Is penguin even edible? I guess Eskimos eat seals all the time but I always imagine they'd be really chewy. And I wouldn't fancy eating a seal either! A-HAR!

This international menu kinds gives out a 'pizza will save the world' vibe, that pizza is an oven in which the dough of world peace will be baked. I'm not sure if I agree with this, I mean, yeah I'm obviously pro-pizza and everything but I doubt Palestine would chill out about everything just because Israel cooked them a couple of pizzas; unless of course they were Hamas and pineapple! A-HAR no.2!

I had the Bombay which was like a chicken curry pizza. It was pretty good, except it had yoghurt on, which is a bit weird for a pizza, but i guess you get yoghurt in curries all the time so maybe not that weird. I don't know. It was good, I liked it, our waitress was nice. In fact she was too nice, like she wanted something from us...

 For that I'm deducting a point.

8 out of 10

Pizza Party

A couple of weeks ago I became a serious contender for the title of 'oldest living human'. To celebrate my entrance onto the world stage of professional not-dying I had a few buddies over. True to one-trick pony form I asked everyone to bring pizza toppings so we could all build, cook and then eat some pizza. Preferably in that order. This is what went down.

Being an arty-farty bunch, people seemed pretty keen on out-pizzaing one another. I'm all for innovation and originality and everything, but this here is a pizza with dough balls on. Call me a cynic but when you have bread below a topping and above a topping, that's not a pizza, that's a sandwich.

I sort of asked people to choose toppings that they felt represented themselves. If you had to describe yourself to someone but couldn't use words, only pizza, how would you do it? People came up with some pretty good ones. Jason, for example, is a little bit Caribbean, so his pizza had a little bit of Reggae Reggae sauce on, which is a little bit Caribbean, like him. What a clever chap, here is a photo of the proudest moment in Jason's life. 

Most people, due to, I imagine, chronically stunted imaginations, were boring and just chose toppings because they liked them. I suppose it could be argued that this may suggest my friends have pretty healthy self-esteems, but I doubt it, or if they do they shouldn't. Generally they're pretty rubbish. Here are some examples of people thrilled by their own mediocrity:

I'm joking of course, my friends are all beautiful people and I am head-over-heels in love with all of them. Look, here's Nick rabbiting on about who-gives-a-shit:

Putting Brian Sewell on a pizza is pretty inspired. I think Nick should enter it into the Turner prize next year. I'm sure Brian would love that. He should call it 'The Art Critizza'. However Brian Sewell-pizza was only one half of a two-part pizza exhibit. This is Pete; he made a Jackson Pollock-pizza that Brian Sewell-pizza was going to be critiquing. Pretty high brow stuff eh? I guess it raises that age old question of "Does pizza imitate art or does art imitate pizza?" Here's Pete being adorably downhearted about it all:

I managed to annoy even more of my guests with inane pizza-questions.This is Shiri being asked pointless questions about ricotta, after you watch it I'm going to tell you another cheese joke.

Q: What cheese do furry, heavy-metal listening, fresh-water mammals enjoy?

A: Rock-otter!

Here are some more people being polite and humouring me by pretending to enjoy my party. Thanks guys, you're all the best.

How wonderful for everyone. 

I call this photo "A Proud Father".

Bye.

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.