Pizza is a Relentless Master

Life continues to be filled with weird “coincidences.”

Yesterday I made the best Sicilian pizza I can even imagine, and I decided to call Mike. Turned out he had left a message for me earlier in the day. Then he sent me a couple of cell photos of a Sicilian he was making. When we finally hooked up, he said he had to tell me about the phenomenal pie he had just made. He was nearly as excited about it as I was about mine.

Here’s a photo. Still waiting for him to send the photo of the finished pie to my email so I don’t have to forward it from my cell.

The way we work is so funny. I called him up and told him about the breakthroughs I had with my cooking method, and he listened, and he decided he had to make a pie. Then he ignored almost all of what I said.

For some reason, he decided to try high-end cheese. He bought some kind of weird mozzarella that comes sitting in water. I’ve never tried that stuff, because it looks pretty gross. He also got expensive provolone and romano. The pizza probably cost forty dollars to make. Maybe more. I guess it had to be more, because he spent at least thirty on the cheese, and he put a lot of meat on it.

He says he could not get the cheese to brown until he used the broiler. Nonetheless, he was thrilled with the results.

His method is a lot more work than mine. I don’t plan to try it any time soon. And that expensive cheese is not for me. I can make myself a wonderful lunch for $1.75, so upping it to ten or fifteen bucks is not appealing. But I’ll bet his pizza was magnificent.

I found something funny today on the web. Someone wants to sell a pizzeria for $14,500. I couldn’t figure out why it was so cheap. It’s in a nice location, and it’s equipped.

While I was rooting around, I found out it’s about fifty feet from a Papa John’s.

My guess? Some guy who made bad pizza got squashed by a megabusiness that makes bad pizza and charges less.

I’m seriously tempted. It may seem stupid to try to sell pizza in a facility nearly next door to Papa John’s, but I don’t think it would be hard. In fact, I think the location would be a blessing. People would grumble as they reluctantly headed to Papa John’s to pick up their disgusting ketchup pies, and what would they see? A new pizzeria a few feet away. What would you do? I know what I’d do. I’d try the new place.

Apart from that, Papa John’s doesn’t rely on foot traffic. They have no seats. So the market isn’t quite the same. And Papa John’s is in a death spiral right now because they don’t sell slices. Cheap joints like McDonald’s are killing them, because people don’t want to spend fifteen dollars for lunch. You can’t have Papa John’s deliver a two-dollar slice to you, but you can get a two-dollar sandwich at McDonald’s. I also learned that in at least in one area of the country, Papa John’s is killing its franchises by jacking up the franchise fee. If they’re doing it there, they’re probably doing it here.

I don’t even understand that. You pay 9% to Papa John’s, plus a one-time (supposedly) $50,000 fee, and in return, what do you get? The right to buy bad ingredients from their commissary, probably at bad prices, plus an obligation to serve customers bad Papa John’s pizza. You can’t make good pizza, even if you want to. You can’t sell slices.

So you’re paying for things that actually damage your business. The only positives are corporate support and the well-known name.

Fifty grand will buy a lot of local advertising. That nine percent would cover your lease, so an additional nine percent would go into your pocket. Where is the down side to going it alone?

I know why people get Papa John’s franchises. I think. It’s because they can’t cook. Franchisees aren’t cooks. They’re dentists and lawyers and businessmen who need to invest their capital. Papa John’s shows up and says, “Give us a giant amount of money, and we’ll tell you how to do everything, and you’ll get a better return than you could expect in the stock market.” So they plop down the cash and open bad pizzerias. And the pizza is just good enough to make their stores turn a profit. It works, but it’s not necessarily the best way to run a pizza joint. I think when a good pizzeria opens next door to Papa John’s, the new place is the predator, not the victim.

We used to have a bad Mexican place down here. I shouldn’t say it was bad. It was okay. It was a shiny chain restaurant. The Texas Taco Factory. The food was better than Taco Bell. It was edible.

Literally fifty feet away, some Mexicans opened a place called Taco Rico. It’s like a closet. It’s not clean. There is barely room for tables.

The Texas Taco Factory was always empty. It was funny. They had a big ol’ drive-thru sign and a freshly blacktopped lot with tons of spaces, and they had nice tables and chairs, and nobody went in. Everyone went next door, to Taco Rico.

The Texas Taco Factory is now a Starbuck’s. There is a second Taco Rico down the road, because the old one did so well. Taco Rico puts tables on the sidewalk out front, because they can’t handle their customer load.

And the food isn’t that good. It’s much better than the competition, but it’s nothing to get excited about. It was good enough to kill the Texas Taco Factory. That’s what matters.

A place that sold pizza, rolls, cheesecake, non-alcoholic beverages, and NOTHING ELSE would kill Papa John’s, if the food was really good. Near me, we have Papa John’s, Domino’s, the dubious and inconsistent “Miami’s Best Pizza,” Gables Pizza and Salad, Cozzoli’s, and Pizza Rustica. Those are all within two miles. Where would I get pizza, if I felt like buying instead of cooking? Dolce Vita, which is a ten-minute drive. I wouldn’t go to any of the closer places, unless I was feeling especially lazy. When you want pizza, you want GOOD pizza. The pizza world is a meritocracy, and pizza is never a commodity.

The Texas Taco Factory used to be a Pizza Hut. They couldn’t even survive.

I fired off an email, to the person selling the pizzeria. I could not resist. Maybe one day I’ll actually do this. But I’ll need to get Mike to totally abandon his career and his family first.

I can’t understand why he hasn’t jumped on my offer.