Pizza Masterclass

Originally posted on Medium in 2018

Long before I started brennan.pizza I was just a brennan who ate pizza.

Here’s the mostly uninteresting evolution of the past 7 years of orders:

• In college there was a Domino’s near me and at the time I didn’t really like Domino’s — it was the cheap pizza of kids birthday parties and tasted like cardboard. What I didn’t know is this was the era where they overhauled everything they did and changed everything. Also, they had a 50% student discount on everything, and I was a broke student, so…

• For the next ~5 years I ordered from that Domino’s every tuesday evening and continued to use my student discount well after graduating. My relationship with the manager and every employee was pretty familiar and no one seemed to mind or care in the slightest that I never paid full price.

• The price I paid was $11.50 or so for a large, which I got 2–3 meals out of: basically the cheapest fast food you can buy, and also my favourite.

• Eventually I discovered no-sauce pizza, and my world was changed. My order for most of this time was the same no-sauce extra cheese ham, pineapple, green pepper. Domino’s sauce is perhaps their weakest aspect, so that might have had something to do with it.

• There was no particular reason behind it being tuesday specifically, that was just my weekly treat day and I have lots of great memories of driving west on 16th into the setting sun with the sunroof open and music loud.

One rainy day, a garbage truck with the claw arm threw my garbage bin into my nearby parked car (this was my old car, so it must have been 2012 or so) and broke the taillight just as I was leaving to pick up my pizza. I had to stay behind filing a report so I was 10–20 minutes late picking up my order. When Domino’s heard my story, they made me a second pizza so it was hot and fresh and gave me both for the price of one. It was a nice little gesture that cost them almost nothing, but I remember it fondly to this day.

• Pizza Hut was always better, in my mind, even at the time, but it was far more expensive without the 50% off discount Domino’s was offering until they introduced the $10 daily specials — monday was hawaiian and for some reason both the medium and the large were the same $10.

• I never switched fully over, but variety is the spice of life — I peppered maybe every third or fourth weekly pizza with Pizza Hut, and being $10 actually made them cheaper than Domino’s.

• Pizza Hut also had a second $15 deal which was a smaller pizza plus breadsticks and boneless wings (AKA: saucy chicken nuggets) and although a strictly worse calories-per-dollar deal, the honey garlic was pretty delicious and those breadsticks are basically butter dough sprinkled with parmesan and as such, deliciously empty.

• One time a friend and I got the Pizza Hut $30 box set, which was 2x medium pizzas, boneless wings, breadsticks and a big cookie thing that comes to you in a cardboard crate. We watched Wes Anderson movies, drank Strongbow and promptly died of simultaneous heart attacks.

One time my new car was in the shop for a while and for a week all I had was my friend’s fixie bike to get around (this is also how I started biking to work: at first out of necessity and then out of love) but I had this great idea that I could bike to the Domino’s and put the pizza box in my backpack; if I tucked down while I rode then the box would stay relatively level on top of me as I got home, right?

Wrong. So wrong.

Haha, ended up with one curled up pizza mash in the bottom corner of the box that I just sort of shoved into my mouth like a huge calzone.

That was the one and only time I’ve ever picked up pizza by bike.

• On halloween night 2015, I moved to a different house way across town.

• This was problematic, actually, because it meant I lost my 50% student discount — it only applied to that specific Domino’s next to the university.

• It was also a new suburb development, so the retail areas weren’t filled out much at all and my nearest pizza place was a jaunt north, but conveniently put Domino’s and Pizza Hut on the same road.

• This is when Pizza Hut took over the weekly pie buy: $10 was simply less, and the cheapest deal for the new Domino’s was their 4 topping large deal which was $12.14.

• Also, this is where the differences in couponing matter: 50% off applied to everything, including extra cheese, whereas the 4 topping deal meant extra cheese started costing extra dollars and I think that price actually went up over the years. Now extra cheese is like $3.50 or something dumb.

• Sometime in 2016 the new Domino’s opened much closer to me in the south, and being both brand new and closer (both physically and that the roads to get there were nicer) so that became my go-to.

• This is also the era they introduce loyalty pizzas: every 6th order gets you a free medium two-topping. It’s spartan, perhaps, but free is great.

• Not to be outdone, Pizza Hut opens a new location nearby in 2017 and I go a few times to check it out.

There’s a subtle but important difference in how the credit card machines in every restaurant work: Domino’s don’t ask for a tip — in fact, they don’t ask for anything at all. You tap your credit card and go, easy. Pizza Hut’s credit card machines have a 5 button process to go through to not tip before you can tap and, honestly, it makes me feel guilty (which is probably the point) to specifically do work in order to get to input zero.

This has been a long running conversation, and I think it’s shifted over time as well, but I don’t tip for pizza that I pick up myself. The rare time I get delivery I’m more than happy to tip drivers as that’s a service they’re performing, but if I do the pickup, who gets the tip? Not the cashier. Not the kitchen. Just… Pizza Hut. And you don’t tip Wendy’s for your burger, so why would you give Pizza Hut a couple bucks just for free? Because the machine asks?

So, I don’t tip Pizza Hut and specifically have to go through menus in order not to do so, which is just a friction point that rubs me the wrong way for that variety of reasons.

Also, that new Pizza Hut was initially staffed with the rudest people, so, I dunno, I have some sort of irrational bias against the location now.

• I should back up a bit: in 2015 when I first moved here, there’s a Great Canadian Pizza at the end of my block. We got it 2–3 times and it was always a mediocre, overpriced thing. It was the pizza of new house IKEA assembly evenings and basically the easiest last resort.

• There’s also a close Papa Johns, which I maintain is the worst of the big brands, and an inconvenient Panago which is good but never has sales.

• The nearest Pizza 73 was like, forever away. Never even tried. Although I think a new one opened next to the Pizza Hut which might warrant explorations and deal-finding.

• In 2017 I started brennan.pizza, a website that tracked all of my pizza consumption for that year. As expected, I averaged about one a week.

• Back to the present: 2018, Pizza Hut changes their $10 meal deal, which now makes the medium $10 and the large $13. Reasonable, perhaps, after years of them being somehow the same price, but a blow to my scheme.

• Oh, also, the Pizza Hut website is revamped towards terrible, so that’s bad.

• Pizza Hut copies the loyalty pizza, except there’s a minimum order price to get the points, so a lot of what I bought didn’t even earn me anything.

• Domino’s comes swinging with a familiar deal: on mondays, every regular pizza is 50% off. The trick I discovered is that you can order a “normal pizza” and then customize it to whatever you want, which basically just lets you order anything and get it for the same cheap price. Extra cheese is still extra, but ordering other cheeses as toppings (like cheddar is considered a distinct topping) are free.

• This is basically where we’re at — that order was last week as of this writing. Going forward I’m going to play with it a bit more both as an online ordering thing and simply as a flavor thing. I have been eating basically the same order weekly for seven years now.

• brennan.pizza was shut down after the year was up and the domain expired. It was an interesting idea, but other than the silly gimmick the data wasn’t especially useful for something that is pretty constant.

• I realize they’re both faceless corporate chains, but I really do think that across the board, Domino’s policies are more human and generous; combined with some good managers like Mike at the university location.

• Pizza Hut, to this day, has a terrible website and tries to loophole you out of their loyalty program. The credit card thing is minor but indicative.

• It is interesting that I’m paying basically the same price (for more toppings!) as I was 7 years ago when this all started. Almost every other restaurant’s prices have inflated over time (as expected) but pizza remains weirdly similar, stuck in time.

Fun bonus fact: I ate at Domino’s Reykjavik Iceland in 2014, but they don’t have green peppers as a topping option which I was greatly disappointed by and the entire country is devoid of ranch dressing so like, what’s the point.

“Cool Ranch” Doritos are called “Cool American” flavour there.