Sunday is pizza night in our house. My bride makes a darn good pizza. Add pepperoni, peppers and mushrooms, and I’m a satisfied customer.
On the rare occasion she doesn’t have the ingredients for her masterpiece of Mediterranean cuisine, we order from a nearby pizzeria and have it delivered in one of those large red insulated bags. The last time we were told we could keep the bag, which I have no use for. Our kitchen is pretty close to the dining table, so if anyone wants a nice pizza delivery bag, perhaps to carry your lunch in, let me know before the next recycling day.
This got me thinking (a dangerous activity) about pizzas in a larger sense. So, I consulted the foremost expert on everything … Google … and found that there are about 78,000 pizza shops in the United States. Massachusetts has 2,213 of them, and they are all named Nick’s. Just kidding, but it seems every town I’ve ever been in has a Nick’s Pizza. I wonder if one guy owns all of them.
Pizza originated in Naples, Italy. A fellow named Raffaele Esposito is credited with creating the tasty pie, but the Romans really had them first. I have not seen any pizza shops named after Raffaele. Poor guy was ahead of his time.
There are pizza shops everywhere. There is one in Cairo, Egypt called “What the Crust.” According to Statistica.com, San Francisco eats the most pizza. They even have a pizza truck and a place called “800 degrees,” whose pizzas cook in 60 seconds for those who are in a hurry, I guess. Chicago and New York are known for their pizzas, but New Jersey has the most pizza shops. Bada Bing Bada Boom! (Yes, there is a Bada Bing Bada Boom Pizza shop in New Jersey.)
Americans eat 100 acres of pizza a day or 350 slices per second. Mama Mia, that’s a lot of pizza! That doesn’t count frozen pizza or pizza popsicles. There are no pizza popsicles but there could be. There are pizza-flavored crackers that aren’t bad. There are gourmet pizzas, artisan pizzas, breakfast pizzas, cold-fired, wood-fired, brick-oven, deep-dish pizzas and, of course, everyone’s favorite school pizza (Ugh!) They come in all shapes and sizes. Round cut in wedges is the most popular and square cut in rectangles.
There are too many pizza-shop names to mention, but I will mention some anyway. Many chain pizzerias are named after their founders: Papa Gino’s, Papa John’s, Regina’s, Celeste’s, and Little Caesar’s are well known. Crazy names abound, “We Knead a Pizza,” “Pig Ate My Pizza,” “Leaning Tower of Pizza.” There is a “City Pizza” in Boston, a “Suburban Pizza” in Excelsior, Minnesota and a “Country Pizza” in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The list goes on and on.
Surveys say the best pizza in the world is a Napolitano pizza. Whose taste buds declared that, I do not know. I do know that the worst pizza in the world, according to the famous chef Gordan Ramsey, is the pineapple pizza, which he calls a “disgrace to humanity.” I agree. Alas, it happens to be my wife’s favorite. Oops.
My favorite pizza of all time is and forever will be from “The Nest” restaurant, which was right here in Mattapoisett. It closed many years ago, but you can’t beat their 10-inch, thin-crust, linguiça (ground, not sliced like pepperoni) pizza along with two Cokes. I would always get two Cokes because the glasses were the size of thimbles. After every sporting event in high school, everyone would meet at The Nest, win or lose. I took my current pizza chef there on our first date.
There seems to be as many pizza shops within a 5-mile radius of our village as there are the number of times I have used the word “pizza” in this essay. In case you are wondering, the word appears 41 times. Just saying.
Bon Appetit!
By Dick Morgado