Dubious Marketing Leads to Window of Opportunity

I’ve been tormenting Mike about pizza for weeks now. Today I think he snapped. He says he’s considering getting a small oven and partnering with some guy who has a panini shop. He says the guy opened across the street from a big high school, and he has no parking, and he sells panini and coffee, and he wonders why he’s going broke.

A puzzle.

Ordinarily, hungry high school kids will make a beeline for the nearest panini and latte.

Mike will do great, if he manages to do five lunch hours in a row. People will say what they always say. ” I can’t believe it! I finally found a good pizza place!” Then a month later, he’ll have to turn customers away, because he has no capacity for crowds.

I hope he doesn’t tell the other guy how to make pizza.

I’m reading up on ovens. I really don’t care about high-temperature pizza. The best pizza I’ve had in my life was made–wait, I was going to say it was made in conventional Bari or Bakers Pride ovens, but that’s not true. The best pizza I’ve had in my life was made in my GE Best Buy oven and my church’s convection and regular gas ovens. After that, Bari and Bakers Pride. After that, I suppose the fancy ovens fit in somewhere.

I understand what they do. They burn the crust a little and make the outside of it hard. Whoopty-doo. What if your customers are among those rare individuals who don’t really care for burned food? Right now, my big worry is excessive browning. I have a wild suspicion that this will be a bigger problem in an oven that burns hot enough to melt foil.

I’ve had lots of pizza from wood-fired ovens. It’s not particularly good. I know that’s heresy, but I don’t care. I’m used to the majority being wrong. A yuppie/metrosexual oven is a lot of aggravation, just to get a niche taste that isn’t all that wonderful.

We have a chain here that advertises coal-fired ovens. That sounds disgusting. Coal is full of tar and weird chemicals. I’m surprised it’s legal to cook with it. Coal has kerosene in it, doesn’t it? They call kerosene “coal oil.” Coal doesn’t smell all that great when it burns. I guess they must have a way of keeping the fumes away from the food.

Anyway, I haven’t tried the coal pizza, but I’ve been told it’s not as good as the best conventional pizza available here. And the best conventional pizza is about a letter grade below my pizza.

This is the craziest city. It seems like almost everyone knows what good pizza tastes like (except Cubans who have never left the county), but almost nobody can make it.

If I end up doing this for real, it will be in big fat stainless ovens powered by gas. Let the metrosexuals reinvent the wheel. I just want to make good food.