ON PIZZA

About half an hour from my hometown, there's a little pizza place called "House of Pizza." Although it isn't the pizza I most closely associate with growing up, I think it's delicious. The same style of pizza is used at other restaurants in Northwest Indiana, one of which opened probably three minutes from my parents' house - an easy treat when I go home to visit.

Because of these things, I like to think that I am sympathetic to places with "House of Pizza" in the name. And, like with improv and comic strips, I probably take pizza more seriously than truly necessary. So yesterday, when I had the opportunity to try "Warren House of Pizza" in Warren, RI, I was something like optimistic.

The servers were friendly. The atmosphere was vintage small-town pizzeria. The prices were okay - even though I still owe Chuck at least $3.50 for my share of our food. We started with chicken nachos. The server - again, friendly to the point of obsequiousness - asked us if we wanted the chicken meat marinated. We said sure, yet the nachos came kind of dripping with this mystery chicken sauce. Hmmm. Apparently I have a different definition of marinated than Warren House of Pizza does.

But then came the pizza, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was my least-favorite of any pizza I've had since coming to the Northeast. Despite the fact that they used apparently the same "formula" as many other pizza restaurants around here [Note: Within ten minutes of my home in Indiana, there are at least three very distinct "styles" of pizza, excluding franchises like Pizza Hut. At my current residence...not so much.], it fell short in pretty much every conceivable category. Flavor, texture, temperature, everything. I was disappointed, but not surprised.

I thought a lot last night about why pizza should matter so much to me, and I think I figured it out. It's my favorite "affordable" food (as opposed to slabs of ribs or steak or something), I worked at a pizza place for three years, and I really identify pizza with home. So maybe I've spent the past two and a half years trying to find - and I can't believe I'm about to type something so ridiculous - a slice of home.