College town=Mecca of Pizza

In the spirit of fairness, I think I should provide a disclaimer for this post.

Disclaimer: I was born in the city of Chicago. I was raised in the northwest suburbs. I grew up having a very narrowly defined view of what pizza should be. As I have traveled about, that view has slowly changed. But...I still have my opinions.

I love pizza. I was raised on the stuff. There was a pizza place just up the block from my parents first apartment together when I was an infant. It was a "family" run Italian pizza joint called Nancy's, (which is now a chain in Chicago and the suburbs.) When we moved out of the city and into the suburbs, their were three pizza restaurants that would come to dominate my childhood, two great pizza places and a mediocre one. The great one's were Village Pizza in Carpentersville and Bill's Pizza in Mundelein. Both of these restaurants were and still are institutions in their respective areas. Both were old school, plank wood floored, shabby supper club chic with peanut shells strewn about. The pizzas were as close to divinity as one could get. And...they WERE NOT Chicago-style deep dish pizzas! If I wanted deep dish, I did the traditional route: Lou Malnati's, Pizzeria Uno, (NOT the chain!) or Giordiano's. Bill's and Village Pizza were different. They served thin crust pizzas that were just as good sitting down in their restaurants as they were sitting down at your dining room table. The mediocrity came in the form of Rosati's Pizza. There's one here in Madison, and they are a chain. The one I went to was in Lake in the Hills, Illinois (I lived there throughout high school) and it wasn't very good...unless you had a six pack of MGD or a dime bag worth of weed in you, then it was greasy, greasy deliciousness!

All this being said, I'm a bit disappointed with pizza here in Madison.

I do understand that Madison is much more than just a college town. This city has an identity all its own without the university. But, it still is a college town and it's missing something as far as pizza is concerned: an institution.

I'm not saying that Madison has nothing but bad pizza. That would simply be untrue. Madison has some very good pizza. What it doesn't have, however, is GREAT pizza. We do not have a mecca of pizza that nearly every college town I've ever been to has. I had asked friends on Facebook living here in Madison to name their favorite pizza place. I got the answers I pretty much expected: Glass Nickel, Ian's, Roman Candle, Falbo's, Pizza Brutta. These are all good choices for pizza, but they're not GREAT. I also noticed that quite a few people named more than one restaurant, and even a few named individual pizzas as well: the feta-licious at Glass Nickel, or the mac-n-cheese pizza at Ian's. But Madison has no great pizza mecca that everyone points to when talking about the best pizza in town.

And so, my fellow Madisonians, I put another question to you: do you agree with my assessment of Madison pizza AND, if you do agree, why do you think this is so?

The pizza-gods await your input.

Why I'm not a "foodie".

I had said to folks on Facebook that my next post was going to be about pizza.

I lied.

I thought it wold be prudent to explain why I started this blog. As I have said in the past, I am notorious for starting blogs out of anger, only to have them fade into the ether along with whatever it was that made me angry in the first place. This blog is different. Food is my passion, my first and only true love. I was a picky eater as a kid. So, after a career in the military cured me of turning my nose up to just about everything, I made up for lost time by eating anything that was stupid or dead enough to get anywhere near my mouth. Food is more than just utilitarian for me, as it is for many people in the world. Food is one of the foundations of culture. One of the clearest windows into any given society is its foodways...and I have come to appreciate that at a higher level. So much so, in fact, that studying food and foodways is what I want to do for a living, which is why I am studying anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

So, I started a blog about food so that I could write about my favorite subject.

But, I don't consider myself to be a foodie.

At one point, I identified with that label. My friends and I have shared some extraordinary meals together, eaten at great restaurants, cooked with the best and freshest of ingredients, pontificated upon what makes great food and drink "great", and have argued endlessly about terms like "authentic" and "artisanal". Despite this, I'm still not a foodie.

There is one term that I associate most with the foodie movement that describes neither me, nor my food-loving friends: pretension.

I can ramble on endlessly about my dream to someday eat at the French Laundry just as easily as I can defend, with every fiber of my being, my pick for best hot dog in Chicago. I don't turn my nose up to much of anything these days. Now, don't mistaken this for going soft on what I consider to be mediocre or even bad food. I'll rip a restaurant or a "latest food trend" a new asshole if I think it sucks. But, when I say that something is awful, it is never due to me disliking a particular type of food and/or preparation. There are a few foods I don't like, such as beets. But I won't slag on a place just because I tried a beet dish I was told I might like and end up hating it. (Don't laugh, I know people who have done this.) I usually dislike a restaurant if I think they're trying too hard to be something they're not, or if they specialize in a particular food item I love and half-ass it.

One other thing I'll mention here is the idea of the "complete experience". I recently visited a barbeque joint just outside of Madison called Porktropolis. I had heard about it from a friend and decided to try it. Before I left to pick up said friend for lunch, I looked up some reviews about the restaurant. Several of the reviews bitched endlessly about the "decor" and the "shabbiness" of the place...and said NOTHING about the food! I think this is what separates me from the foodie mindset: they want the complete experience. A foodie wants every aspect of their dining experience to be just right, otherwise it's not worthy of their time or money. I am all about the food. The barbeque we had for lunch that day was awesome! The restaurant was a little shabby. But the food was so good, I would have eaten my lunch on a folding card table with milk crates for chairs!

In short, I'm going to leave the foodie label behind. Those folks can whine incessantly about rude waiters and sub-par restaurant amenities. I just want to eat.

That is why I am an eater, and not a foodie. And that is why this blog exists: to discuss food in all of its wondrous forms.

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

"Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself." - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891


Cravings. We all have them.

This past Saturday, the sandwich above was mine.


Cravings can take on many forms. Sometimes it's as simple as a desire for a taste of chocolate, easily satisfied with a candy bar or even some chocolate milk.

Sometimes cravings enter the realm of obsession, requiring a tremendous amount of time, money, and/or effort to placate oneself. Take, for instance this website: http://www.kleincast.com/maps/mcrib.php This is a user-driven website devoted to locating the elusive McRib sandwich around all of North America, complete with a map, a forum,(to share McRib-related stories, I assume) and a blog.

Some cravings defy logic. For instance, I love White Castle hamburgers. Much like the McRib, White Castles are horrible examples of food. They're of the lowest quality in almost every conceivable way: the meat, the onions, pickle, the buns...fucking horrible! Does the 30+ years worth of knowledge of this fact stop me from eating a sack of 10 every time I go to a White Castle...hell no! My internal organs feel like death an hour after finishing them, but the nostalgia, the fucking nostalgia!

Which brings me to this past Saturday. I wanted the sandwich pictured above with a vengeance. It's a Seafood Delight from Subway. I don't eat them very often, but when the craving hits, I will scour the landscape until one has been located. And only after I've eaten 12 inches of beautifully horrible fake-crabby goodness will I be satiated. This past weekend, however, it was just not meant to be.

Subway has discontinued the Seafood Delight here in the Madison area. I went to three different stores, all told me the same sad tale. No more fake crab mixed with mayonnaise and god knows what else stuffed between fresh baked bread with cheese and lettuce and tomatoes...I think I'm going to cry! Making matters worse, none of the other sandwich chains here in town make one either. Not Jimmy Johns, nor Milios, nor Cousin's, nor Silver Mine...nobody. My desires, short of going out and buying the ingredients and making it myself, would be left unfulfilled.

I settled for some mediocre seafood salad from a local Italian-style deli. It was a sad day, indeed.