The Walk: Chicken, Sweetcorn and Olives

The Walk is a little tea shop in Nottingham owned by Cake-Fairies. In the kitchen Granny Cake-Fairy sings this song about cherries and sugar and kittens while she bakes, and there's a constant stream of woodland creatures coming through the door. It's all quite childish and girly, like something out of a Disney movie except pinker. Obviously I am way too much of a hetero-dude to like all that but the five year old girl inside me, (the one I ate for lunch LOL*) loves it.

They also have Uncle Cake-Fairy, who is, as was a condition of his parole, employed as their pizza cook. He's drunk and racist and you can hear him making lewd comments from the kitchen about the pixie waitresses. It's fine though because he churns out some pretty good pizzas.

They serve the pizzas on pieces of slate. My suspicion is they let drunk Uncle Cake-Fairy write the shopping list and he misspelt 'plates', so they got lumped with 'slates' instead. No-one wanted to call him up on it because he gets violent after a couple thimbles of dizzy water. 

Obviously I didn't eat the olives because I don't hate myself, but the rest was all pretty good. The base was a bit hard, kind of like a breadstick, except not in the shape of a stick, and also not bread. So actually nothing like a breadstick. 

7 out of 10

*Not LOL, it's been a slow week.

Ask: Calzone con Carne Piccante

You guys know what a Calzone is don't you? If you don't, first I slap my tongue stuffed lower lip/chin at you and then I tell you it is basically a folded over pizza. Yumz o'clock right?

Go to an online translation website. Try this one. Type in 'Calzone' as an Italian to English translation and see what you get.

Yeah. I know. What the hell is that all about? My guess is some hilarious Italian dude folded a pizza in half, it caught on, as a joke he called it a 'Calzone' and, like a bunch of trusting idiots, we just assumed that 'Calzone' was Italian for 'folded over pizza'.

I bet whenever Italians overhear tourists go on about how tasty that Calzone was, or how much they enjoyed putting that Calzone in their mouth, they have a little snicker and do a tiny, patriotic high-five in their heads.

It would be like if kebabs suddenly caught on in Rome and the Italians were begging to know what these suspiciously hairy parcels of almost-meat were called and we decided to be really funny and told them kebabs were called 'scrotums' and then Italians would be all "Yeah, let's go eat some scrotums, boy, I'd love a good English scrotum right now. Mmm, mmm, mmmm. Yummy, yummy scrotums" And then we could all have a laugh because it was a really elaborate, nation-wide joke we were all in on.

That said, it was perhaps one of the tastiest pranks I've been on the receiving end of, so this time Mario, I'm going to let it slide.

9 out of 10

(> 4-Way Pizza Rumble <)

I haven't posted anything on here for over a week. If anyone thought that this was because, like a normal person who has been eating the same food almost daily, I'd got sick of pizza and had given up then, I'm afraid, you'd be both wrong and an idiot. 

Four pizzas go in, only one comes out. As in 'four pizzas go into some kind of metaphorical battle', not 'four pizzas go into my digestive system, only one comes out'. Were that the situation I'd desperately need to see my doctor about a nasty case of pizza retention. Anyway, meet the contenders:  

Pizza Express: American Hot

                                      

This is the supermarket version of Pizza Express and it was half price in Waitrose because it was out of date or something. So far, so good. When I was younger I'd avoid ordering this because, in my head, it was dangerously spicy. If I could go back in time I'd slap nine-year old me for being such a wuss, force him to eat one of these and then tell him to not waste possibly hundreds of pounds on Warhammer over the next two years and buy a skateboard instead.

Chicago Town: Footie Feast (Limited Edition)

I don't know what connection this pizza has to football. There were sausage balls on it, does that count? I don't know. I don't like football very much, it's not the actual game that bugs me I think it's just how worked up people get about it. Everyone just needs to chill out. I think if the players didn't get so excited when they scored then that would help. Maybe a little thumbs up to the crowd, a polite handshake for the guy who crossed the ball in, none of this triple-flip-rip-my-clothes-off-kiss-you-on-the-mouth stuff. 

BBQ sauce stuffed crust ftw btw.

Pizza Express: La Reine

This is another supermarket Pizza Express. It was also reduced, but only by 75p, so I'd say the American Hot has the edge. And it had olives on, obviously I picked them off, for they truly are the grapes of Satan. 'Reine' is French for 'queen'. Do you think they mean royalty or camp, gay guys? This didn't seem like a very gay pizza, I mean, the mushrooms were a bit herby but I don't think anything can be inferred from that. 

Bakerino's Sausage Pizza

This guy is definitely the underdog but it has the advantage of being part of a deal where you get any pizza, any cookie and any drink (not vitamin water) for £2.99. The pizza was pretty shit but the cookie was amazing. It was oat and raisin. Seriously, I would have this again just for the cookie. That's not to say the bottle of coke wasn't good, but it was just a bottle of coke. Anyway, I'm getting side-tracked and god forbid I deviate off the topic of pizzas. The pizza was pretty boring and the sausages were just Wall's or something. Nothing to write home about:

"Dear Mum,
                   I ate an uninteresting sausage, just thought you might like to know.
                                             Love,
                                                       Joe"

See? What a shit letter.

THE VERDICT

Chicago Town: Footie Feast!!!

Congratulations Chicago Town. You were my favourite. You won because when I ate you I was super hungover and was watching a shitty Bill Murray movie, a.k.a. the perfect Saturday afternoon. Well done.

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 Express Capricciosa

I once got angry with Pizza Express for messing up my order. (Here I am in a rage that will burn your eyebrows off, read if you dare or need a quick alternative to plucking).

Guess what. It happened again. You'd think I would have totally hulked out and beat the waiter's face into a Sloppy Giuseppe, but I didn't. This was because, this time, it was my fault. In my head I definitely said "no olives" but turns out the waiter wasn't psychic so lo and behold: I got olives.

How great would psychic waiters be? They'd walk up to your table, everyone would be all quiet and thinking about what food they wanted and the waiter would just scribble it down, and at the end you wouldn't have to do the 'bill please wave', or ask for another drink or anything that involves the now glaring impracticalities of talking. They'd just know. From now on I'm tipping at 5% until they get psychic waiters.

When it said there was going to be egg on this guy I had an image of a fat, fried egg in the middle, which would have been great, not lame-o, boiled egg slices. A psychic waiter would have known this and sorted it out. Just saying.

7 out of 10

Pizza Hut Buffet

About two years ago I made a promise to myself that I would never have the Pizza Hut buffet again. Sorry me, turns out I'm/you're an untrustworthy, weak-willed sneak. In my defence I only ate it for the sake of this review, because I was walking by and that it's £5.49 for unlimited pizza.

PIZZA FACTS:

1. Pizza Hut pizzas are cooked in motor oil.
2. That whole 'Pasta Hut' thing never happened. It was just a dream you once had.
3. The CEO of Pizza Hut is called Jabba. 

These are just a selection of the slices. I didn't want to review them all because it would be boring for you and embarrassing for me. I'm not going to tell you my magic number either. It's gross.

No meat? Seriously? There was a mysterious yellow cube on this guy, I didn't know what it was, all I know is that it wasn't meat and was poorer for it.

4 out of 10

This guy had little white lumps on that turned out to be chicken. He also had BBQ sauce instead of tomato. I really like BBQ sauce on pizzas. This is an awful, shameful secret that I hide from people like I'd hide the dead bodies of nine-year olds in my attic. (Don't worry, I don't have an attic).

7 out of 10

Pepperoni.

I almost wrote 'nuff said'. God, imagine if I had. That would have been dreadful. 

6 out of 10

This was a slice of Hawaiian. It was only when I got back to the table that I realised there was no ham on it, just pineapple. It was a fruit pizza, and therefore one of my five a day. Healthy living!

5 out of 10

Gregg's Pepperoni

This guy costs £1.19, had six pieces of pepperoni on and was slightly smaller than my hand. Those are probably the most interesting pieces of information about this little chap I can think of. I read somewhere that there are more Gregg's in the north of England than Starbucks. I don't really know what can be gleaned from this, perhaps sausage rolls are more popular in the north (likely) or expensive coffee with names that are hard to pronounce is less popular (also likely). Whatever the reason I don't think I care, sausage rolls can fuck off.

Gregg's needs to sort out their pepperoni distribution. If I hadn't specifically asked for this particularly meat-heavy guy I could have ended up paying the same price for what is known in the industry as a 'PepperNOni'. I wouldn't have been happy about that. Just thinking about it is going to cost you points Gregg or Gregg's. Also, stop hogging all the the 'G's, 50% of a name should never be made up of the same letter, that's just weird.

4 out of 10