Blogger 365 Day 202 - Unofficial taste tests

     I didn't plan on this being my next foray into blogging, but events from last night pretty much precipitated it.  In truth I guess this particular entry started last Tuesday, when I was sitting in my apartment mulling over what I would have dinner.  I had decided that I was in the mood for pizza, which usually would mean I would go out and head up the street and get one of the cheapie pizza's from Antoon's, where they offer a large cheese pizza for $5, but I was being lazy and as I was going through my email I saw that there was a special at Papa John's, where you would get a large two topping pizza for $10.  I figure this option would kill two birds with one stone, one by fulfilling the craving I was having and two by meeting my need for laziness by delivering the pizza to me rather than forcing me to go get it.

     Now I am not a fan of the politics of the owner of Papa John's, in fact it is one of the reasons I do not order from them more often than I do, but I still usually order from them maybe once or twice a year.  They generally make a pretty consistent pizza, and I do love their breadsticks and garlic dipping sauce. Big fluffy bread sticks, I can usually fill up just on those without even making it to the pizza.  If I had any complaint about tehir breadsticks it would only be that they are pretty plain, not a lot of seasoning going on, but for me that is what the garlic sauce is for (though they could do with putting two sides of it with an order rather than one).   I usually find their pizza pretty consistent in flavor as well, and Tuesday was no different when I went with pepperoni and ground beef as my two toppings.  Papa John's is not the best pizza I have ever had, but they have a McDonald's like quality about them in that it is usually pretty consistent no matter where you order it from, you know going in what you are going to get.  So overally my dinner was solid if not spectacular.

     Last night I again was online, I think I was just finishing up with that long-ish blog that I had put together and was looking to either make dinner or forage around the apartment for something to eat when I saw a banner ad on a website, Domino's was offering 50% off any pizza ordered online, a special that they apparently had been running all of last week and Sunday was the last day for that particular offer.  As infrequently as I order from Papa John's, it would be almost an everyday occurrence compared to how often I order from Domino's.  In fact the last time I had ordered from Domino's would have been before the whole advertising campaign they ran a few years back where they said that they were now going to make their pizzas better, a concept I had actually blogged about at the time if only to complain about it, arguing that if Domino's had it in their ability  to make a better pizza and were changing their recipe to do so, why advertise it and basically tell people that for your last 30+ years of existence you were content to sell your customers shit; just make the tweaks you need to make and move on.

     Still, I saw the offer in front of me and while I didn't have the craving I had earlier in the week, if I was going to give them another chance no better time than when the pizza was half off, if the changes were good then maybe they would pry away my order or two a year from Papa John's and if not then I wouldn't be out as much money as if I had bought their pizza at full price.  Perusing the menu, I settled on a meat lovers pizza (I think it was called a meatzza or some such nonsense) and again I opted for the order of breadsticks.

     I had no issues with the delivery, all went smoothly on that end (the same can be said for the Papa John's order as well) but when I got the food into my apartment it was a different matter entirely.  First I opened the breadsticks and on the plus side you do get two sides of sauce with your order versus one from Papa Johns.  The breadsticks were seasoned with what looked like Parmesan cheese (a plus) and some oil or butter concotion (a minus) that left a puddle of some greasy nonsense throughout the box.  The breadsticks themselves were not really breadsticks at all, it was a half pounded out pizza dough with lines in it almost like perforations on say a check stub, so I had to actually tear the breadsticks apart.  Now if I am camping in the woods and I ask someone to gather some sticks for a fire, I would not expect them to come back with a tree and a bunch of lines on it to mark how to cut the tree in order to get the sticks I require.  As much as I could complain about the breadsticks, they were the highlight of the meal, the pizza literally had puddles of grease on the top and biting into it, the dough was only half cooked, there was a layer of undercooked chewiness between the toppings and the bottom of the crust that was completely unappetizing.  The fact that the pizza came in a black box with all kinds of writing on it saying how their pizzas are made by hand and use fresh dough every day was not a selling point for me, all it meant was that they manually fucked this thing up.  It was a disastrous experience, one that honestly I will never repeat. 

     So if given a choice between the two in the future I guess I would go with papa Johns, not because they are great, but because Domino's is just that bad.