The Pizza Rant

Not that it's impossible to get an acceptable slice here. I have recently discovered a couple of local joints that serve a pretty good pizza, one right near my place of business, the other near my preferred sequential art emporium. They might not stand out among the great pizzas of the world, but they can keep me going. There may be other beacons of pizza hope in the greater St. Louis area. For the most part, however, STL is a pizza wasteland.

Perhaps I should start with my (admittedly evolving) standards for pizza. As a wise man once said, "Toppings do not great pizza make." The foundation of pizza is the crust; if a pizza crust is not good enough to be worth eating on its own, then piling the best toppings in the world on top will not make it a good pizza. I like it relatively thin, with a slightly crisp surface, but with enough substance to chew on. (It may be possible to produce such a crust in an environment other than a brick oven, but why take chances? OK, a proper stone surface in a standard home oven will do in a pinch, but I'm talking about professionally-crafted pie here.) Then again, without toppings, said crust is nothing more than a good flatbread. Sauce should be flavorful, and I personally prefer spicy sauces to sweet, as well as distinct herbal notes. For structural reasons, the sauce layer should not be thick enough to prevent proper adhesion of the cheese layer. While I can live with the basic mozzarella if it's good, I do have a slight preference for mixtures of yellow and white cheeses (say, grated cheddar and mozzarella). All this makes for a fine slice of cheese pizza, but I usually go for a few well-chosen toppings, such as the ANSI standard pepperoni and mushrooms, or onions and black olives. Sometimes I like anchovies, but usually remember at bedtime that they don't much like me.

There are, of course, exceptions. At times I like exotic California-style agglomerations such as barbecue chicken or Thai chicken with peanut sauce. I also have a fondness for Chicago-style deep dish pie, with its monstrous pile of cheese and toppings layered between a pair of thin crusts. What I don't like all that well is the thick "pan" or "Sicilian" crust pizza. Maybe there are places that do superthick crusts well, but every one I've had was sort of doughy-goopy-underdone.

Here in St. Louis, as everywhere else, we have the big three national chains: the Roof, the Gamepiece, and the Father. You know the ones; I don't see any reason to name them. I'll occasionally call these bozos up when I don't want to go out, and can't get anything better delivered in my area. They assuage hunger, but let us not pretend that they are any better than mediocre. I can't really fault the sauce, or the cheese, or the toppings, but there is something fundamentally lacking in the crust. You've seen the ovens they use, right? Some sort of conveyer-belt thing that they could train monkeys to use if minimum-wage students weren't cheaper and (usually) cleaner. You slide raw dough covered with raw toppings at one end, it passes through a scientifically-defined temperature for a scientifically-defined interval, and something slides out the other end that resembles a crust in that it allows transport of toppings from box to mouth. You get three basic crust types from the chains: Thin and crisp with insufficient substance to chew or taste, thick and doughy with little structure other than an overbrowned bottom, and sort of an in-between compromise that mimics the shape, but not the flavor or structure, of a good brick-oven crust. It's food, but that's about all I can say for it.

While the entire nation gets to share in this misery, St. Louis has its own circle of Pizza Hell. There is a distinctive "St. Louis Style" pizza to which no one else would lay claim. The crust is thinner and more flavorless than even the national-chain thins, somehwere between a saltine cracker and a sheet of posterboard. The sauce is usually thin and insipid, roughly equivalent to watered-down catsup. Meat toppings tend towards the greasy. For some incomprehensible reason, the round pizza is usually sliced into a square grid, but this doesn't bother me in itself. I'm willing to write off all of these qualities as a difference in personal/regional taates. The true horror lies in the alleged cheese called provel.

Provel is supposed to be a blend of about five different cheeses, including mozzarella, provolone, and who knows what else. When you get it at the grocery store, it's this soft white stuff extruded into ropes. Atop a St. Louis style slice, it's usually either its original white color or heavily browned (almost burned). Provel does not taste good. It does not taste bad. It does not taste. It is the anti-taste. It is that which eliminates taste from all that which it touches. It is an abombination against all that which does not suck. It has some way of coating and numbing the tongue which dulls one's sense of taste for hours if not days. Soon after I moved to St. Louis, I read some food column where the reviewer compared provel to Elmer's Glue, and that was somebody who likes the stuff. However, provel may have its uses. Even a thin layer can be cool to the touch, yet hold a mouth-searing interior heat. If NASA was not involved in its invention, they need to take some samples down to the lab to analyze its thermal properties. I'm convinced that they could just smear it all over the Space Shuttle to protect it from the heat of reentry instead of the current problematic thermal tiles.

Yet native Saint Louisans love the stuff. Not all natives, of course, but I have found remarkably few non-natives who can stand it any more than I can. Expatriate St. Louisans, on the other hand, will have it shipped across the country (if not around the globe) as a delicacy. I got into a flamewar with a native on the subject a few days ago; I backed down only when he threatened to have me exiled to the white flight capital of Missouri. (St. Charles County may be the only thing in the state that's blander, whiter, and more homogenized than provel itself.) I don't get it; I don't want to get it.

Somehow, "St. Louis Style" splits the bulk of the local pizza market with the national chains. There are two major local chains (Imo's and Cecil Whittaker's) and any number of local shops that specialize in dealing the stuff out to locals. For the rest of us, there are a handful of restaurants, apparently run by immigrants from the coasts, that produce a decent New York or California style pie. East Coast Pizza out in Chesterfield and the few Racanelli's stores scattered around are my favorites, though the California Pizza Kitchen chain will do in a pinch.

Still, St. Louisans swear by their thin, gluey pizzas. I just swear at it.