For absolutely no reason other than to support my children’s school’s spirit day partnership with a local restaurant fundraiser, I ordered some pizzas from a local pizzeria that was the chosen restaurant of the month to split their profits with the school.
Believe me, there’s nothing in it for me or my household by ordering New York-style pizzas.
Doing it for the kids.
Anyway, those who have ever worked in the restaurant business or have a decent understanding of how a lot of them work, know that one of the highest profit margins comes from soft drinks. Like a bag of syrup for like Coca-Cola costs $80, but the ROI on the entire bag is usually 2-3 times that, depending on what the business decides to charge for soft drinks.
Over the last few years though, I’ve noticed that if there was ever something to challenge soft drinks on the profit margin scale, it would definitely have to be pizza toppings. Of course, adding things onto your pizza should not really be free unless you’re a giant like Pizza Hut, Domino’s or Papa John’s, but those pizzas are all garbage anyway and aren’t really considered pizza as much as Chinese food should be considered Chinese.
But from all the independent, mom-n-pop types of pizzerias, I’ve noticed a tremendous amount of inflation as far as pizza toppings go over the last few years. One pizzeria I used to frequent when I was a little bit closer to the city, charged like 50¢ per added topping to a slice of pizza, to which when you’re ordering by the slice typically is a little more negligible, but when ordering up some pizzas (for the kids) the other day, adding toppings was now up to $3 per topping for an entire pie.
Look, I know everyone loves to cry inflation as justification for costs going up across the board these days, but ain’t no way adding pepperoni and mushrooms onto my pie should be the same cost as an appetizer of garlic bread.
I was complaining about this to a friend of mine, and I stated that the cost of adding two toppings to a pizza is now the cost of an entire Little Caesar’s pizza, and if I were going to be paying that much, I might as well just ask to have an entire Little Caesar’s pizza chopped up and spread out onto my pizza as a topping itself.
And then it dawned on me just how brilliant of an idea that could possibly be, and how much of a culinary atom bomb of an invention that could be if ever tried out.
But this couldn’t be something I tried out on my own, because for the idea to be optimal to what I’ve fantasized, the Little Caesar’s would have to be chopped up and spread onto the pizza before it goes in the oven, not afterward, because then it wouldn’t have cooked into the pizza itself. And you can’t do it after the fact because then you’d be overcooking the pizza outright.
It would be nice to be able to walk into one of the local pizzerias that I like, with my own Little Caesar’s in tow, and place my order, and then ask them to chop up this Little Caesar’s and top my pizza with it, and I’ll give them $6 for the equivalent cost, because if the cost of toppings is going to be as much as an entire Little Caesar’s, might as well get an entire fuckin Little Caesar’s put on top my pizza for reals then.
For the kids.
