8 ms·
> but the overall quality of your average slice in the city has definitely suffered This is true of the big national chains, too. They've kept prices relativel
by yamtaddle 4y ago
> but the overall quality of your average slice in the city has definitely suffered
This is true of the big national chains, too. They've kept prices relatively stable for damn near 25 years, at this point, but quality has gotten far worse over that same time span. That mouth-watering Pizza Hut pie you remember from 1992 isn't all nostalgia—every now and then I find single-location or small-chain joints that make pizza very similar to how I remember those tasting. Thing is, those are like $15+ a pie now, with a coupon or special. But you can still get larges for $8 or less (coupon or special, which are available 100% of the time) at the major chains—they're just not the same pizza you were getting in the 80s up to about the late 90s.
[EDIT] In fact, the 2020-on inflation is the first time I've seen the big chains seriously give in on keeping price increases in check. They've gone up like 20% in the last couple years.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y agoAt the risk of sounding like an ad I’m kind of startled at how not-terrible Little Caesars is for the price. A lot of food and a completely reasonable tasting and baked pie for stupid cheap when compared to almost everything else.
- alar44 4y agoLittle Caesars is objectively terrible, sorry.
- ttymck 4y agoThe subjective nature of reality disagrees with you, sorry.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yamtaddle 4y agoSeconded, cannot relate. They're worth the $6 or whatever but not a penny more. Better than most $6 frozen pizzas, I suppose. They have that going for them. They're also a good example of this, actually. They'd held their $5 price point for a long time but had gradually been cutting toppings until they were comically bare. Then they introduced a $6 "extra toppings" (or something, I don't recall the way they phrased it) pie that just had the same amount the normal ones used to. Post-Covid I'm pretty sure the sad-pie price is up to $6, and the actually-has-toppings edition is $7.
- alexjplant 4y agoI'd never defend Little Caesar's as amazing pizza but it does exactly what it's supposed to, i.e. hits the spot when you're looking for primal satisfaction of a craving for a greasy pile of dough and cheese. When I want "real" pizza I walk down the street for something Neapolitan or NY-style but if I'm hanging with a large group of friends and feel like pigging out then I see nothing wrong with going all-in for some Deep Deep Dish from LC.
- kevinsundar 4y agoIn my metro area they increased prices to $7. However, quality has drastically improved. If you haven't tried em recently they are very different than the old thin, taste like nothing, Little Caesars pizzas.
- Turing_Machine 4y agoAre they using real cheese nowadays (even bulk processed cheese)? If so, perhaps they have improved. The last time I had one (which was admittedly a long time ago) they were using some kind of "imitation cheese-flavored product" or something along those lines.
- RandallBrown 4y agoI genuinely feel bad for you. I really enjoy Little Caesar's (and most pizza.)
- yamtaddle 4y agoThe ideal place to be is knowing when pizza is bad, but still being able to enjoy bad pizza. That kinda goes for most things, really.
- DonHopkins 4y agoI'm that way with my science fiction. I'm bistellar: I love both Star Wars and Star Trek. But I fully realize that Bladerunner is astronomically better than either of them. And none of those masterpiees keep me from fully enjoying smutty trash like Space Truckers, or even any of Philip K Dick's horrible random short stories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQOqLOErhZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQOqLOErhZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8Ifaeff0mA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8Ifaeff0mA
- jamiek88 4y agoHey me too! I love Iain Banks, and geek out over some Stanislaw Lem but also enjoy the crappy book one of twelve kindle unlimited shitty space operas. Unedited tosh most of it but it does a job !
- alar44 4y agoNo, the ideal place is knowing when pizza is bad and not getting bad pizza.
- ncallaway 4y agoYou don’t need to apologize to them. We should be saying sorry to you. Someone who gets enjoyment out of a $5 pizza is in an objectively better position than someone who can only get enjoyment out of a $10 pizza. Sorry!
- LarryMullins 4y agoThis is how I explain my refusal to learn anything about the varieties and nuances of "good coffee". If I learned to appreciate good coffee, would I still be able to enjoy common dinner coffee? I fear not.
- yamtaddle 4y agoI'm fairly sure I have a well-above-average ability to appreciate actually-good coffee and actually-good pizza—but am also genuinely happy with the bad stuff, even though I'm entirely aware it's bad (within reason—I've had a couple gas station cups of coffee that weren't just bad, but wrong, and I wasn't able to finish them, and instant coffee usually gets a polite "no thanks" from me, but if Folger's or Kirkland Ground or whatever is what you've got, I'll be truly grateful to have it) I'm not that way with wine and beer. I don't like bad wine or beer at all. I will turn it down or just drink it to be polite, not enjoying it a bit. I think the difference is I never liked bad wine or beer, while I started out liking bad pizza and bad coffee before I learned what the good stuff tasted like. So, you might be safe. [EDIT] Reflecting more on this, part of it may be that I regard bad coffee and bad pizza as pretty much totally different things from good varieties of the same—I just happen to like both. I don't really consider one a substitute for the other, I guess. Bad coffee is just coffee-flavored... but I like coffee flavor! Good coffee has all kinds of flavors going on. If you're interested in getting into that, I recommend finding a highly-regarded local roaster doing a tasting event—I personally find it much easier to get into a new flavor-related thing, such that I can start to understand it and pick out various notes, if I can do side-by-side tastings of various examples of the thing, all in a short span. It's similar with beer and wine, I just happen not to like "beer-flavored" or "wine-flavored", the way I do like coffee-flavored coffee or find greasy bread smeared with salty cheese and tomato sauce satisfying even if it's pretty awful—get me the nice stuff that has more going on and I'm in heaven, though.
- harrydehal 4y agoEven the late Anythony Bourdain could espouse on the greatness of an "objectively terrible" Wafflehouse meal. There's a time and place for everything, and even the snobbiest of us food snobs can appreciate the time and place for the likes of Little Ceasars, Costco Pizza, Wafflehouse, et al.
- javajosh 4y agoI also love Waffle House's food despite, maybe even because, it's 'bad'. Their waffles are legit good; the rest is coffee shop slop of the highest order. Recommended. (Glad Bourdain had the guts to say this)
- nobody9999 4y agoWaffle House is open late and the food has lots of carbs and fat. Which means it's good drunk food available when the drunks want to eat. I live 1,000 miles away from the nearest one, but I sure did love a late Saturday night at Waffle House when I lived in the south. Where I am now, a "109 spicy special,"[0] hot off the grill, a single serving bag of nacho cheese Doritos and Pepsi does the job too. [0] https://bwog.com/2007/01/how-spicy-is-your-special/ https://bwog.com/2007/01/how-spicy-is-your-special/
- blastro 4y agoI read this in Bourdain's voice.
- ethbr0 4y agoTo be fair, Waffle House completely overhauled their menu ~2 years(?) ago. Gone is the 90s yellow a la carte one. Gone even is the replacement that at least kept the classics on the back. Now it's $8+ meals, with token hashbrown options at the bottom. Used to be, you could get a perfectly serviceable meal there for under-$6. E.g. double hashbrowns ($3) + single hamburger ($1) + drink ($1.5). Now the closest thing to the same meal is double the price. Double hashbrown $5. Single hamburger doesn't exist, and hamburgers start at $6.
- geocrasher 4y ago
- canadianfella 4y ago[dead]
- blurri 4y agoIt's $5 man. Also, that's just like your opinion man.
- mitchell_h 4y agoit's $5 for a single toping, walk in and walk out with hot-ish pizza. Is it great? no. Does it have enough qualities that make it good? yes.
- yamtaddle 4y agoAs the meme goes: "$5, hot and ready." "Is it good?" "It's HOT and it's READY."
- izackp 4y agoThey raised the price and added more pepperoni (less cheese). :(
- beowulfey 4y ago7-Eleven Pizza used to be similar. In grad school I loved grabbing two slices and an Arnold Palmer for like $3 or whatever it was.
- pastor_bob 4y agoHave you been to Cicis? Literally all you can eat + pasta. Dirt cheap. If you're the 'one-meal-a-day' type, is there a cheaper option?
- yamtaddle 4y agoCostco's pizza works out pretty damn well on a just-get-some-calories-in-me-but-don't-make-me-cook basis, too, if you want something you can carry out. Two days of calories for $10.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y agoYeah for sure, also a really good point.
- ethbr0 4y ago* Must live in part of town with a Costco ;)
- readonlybarbie 4y ago[dead]
- jjeaff 4y agoI don't know what it is now, but Cici used to have $1.99 all you can eat pizza buffets on certain days of the week. This would have been in the mid 90s. Unbelievably (suspiciously?) cheap even for then.
- splistud 4y ago[dead]
- coredog64 4y agoLittle Caesars used to be so much better. This was the time period when they were selling you two pizzas on a paper-wrapped flat for the price of one major chain pizza. Not sure when they switched to extreme value focus.
- bluedino 4y agoAll of my teenage hacking was fueled by leftover Little Ceasers and Mt Dew
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoCostco pizzas fill that niche for me. Ton of food for $10, somewhat better than Little Caesers, and until cost cutting measures during the pandemic, a very passable combo pizza.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoPizza Hut pan pizza is the easiest pizza to make yourself at home. You don't need a stand mixer, it's a no knead recipe (long overnight rise builds all the gluten). You don't need a fancy super hot oven, it just cooks at 400 degrees F in a cast iron skillet. Give this recipe a shot, it's unbelievably good and very accessible: https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-pan-pizza-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-pan-pizza-recipe or https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-srfPL5CWZs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-srfPL5CWZs
- trynewideas 4y ago> You don't need a stand mixer, it's a no knead recipe (long overnight rise builds all the gluten). You don't need a fancy super hot oven That recipe is just focaccia with about half the olive oil, probably replaced by whatever runs off the toppings: https://www.saltfatacidheat.com/fat/ligurian-focaccia https://www.saltfatacidheat.com/fat/ligurian-focaccia - no stand mixer - no kneading - overnight room-temperature rise - 4:3 flour-water ratio - dough is dimpled in the pan before baking The Ligurian focaccia recipe brines it with salt water, which you don't strictly have to do but helps considerably, and bakes at 450F, which arguably so should any cast-iron pizza because the crust won't crisp up as much at 400F.
- webkike 4y agoFocaccia is basically pizza without the sauce so I'm not sure if the clarification is helpful? Wikipedia claims that some places even call focaccia pizza bianca
- alarge 4y agoThere is no way that New York style pizza can be compared to Focaccia. They have almost nothing in common. Now that Chicago thing, maybe. But as far as I'm concerned, that's not pizza.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoNo one said this was NY style. The original comment was lamenting that Pizza Hut pan pizza doesn't taste as good as it did in the 80s and 90s. I pointed out recipes that directly mimic that classic pan pizza style. Pizza Hut is not and has never claimed to be New York style pizza. It's an entirely different style that's neither New York nor Chicago style. It's closest to Detroit style pizza.
- LarryMullins 4y agoCounterpoint: A $10 large "brooklyn" pizza from Dominos today is vastly better than any Pizza Hut or Dominos pizza ever was in the 90s. Not as good as a pizza from a halfway decent independent pizzeria, but half the price.
- ethbr0 4y agoThat's only because Dominos infamously, sometime during the 2010s(?), ran a campaign that amounted to "Our current pizza sucked, but we've got a new recipe that's better."
- yamtaddle 4y agoWhat's weird is I was around for that, was in college and ate Domino's pretty regularly at the time, and everyone seems to believe it was indeed a lot better, but I thought it was a ton worse than what they had before. Just tasted like a lot more MSG and oregano.
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoI struggle to imagine a savory food that can't be improved with more MSG and oregano.
- silisili 4y agoI felt the same way. When I was in my early 20's, little caesers had $5 pizzas, so of course Dominos did $4 pizzas. One topping, large. Believe it or not, both were decent. No, nothing compared to NY slices or what have you, but good enough. I tried Dominos after the 'realignment' and found it much worse than I remembered. But, it could be I hadn't eaten there in a few years prior...maybe it went from good, to bad, to ok in that timespan?
- LarryMullins 4y agoI think they were right. Their standard crust is still trash that scrapes up my mouth, but the "brooklyn" crust is passable.
- 4y ago
- Spooky23 4y agoAgreed. A good pizza is $20 retail, $8-12 at home. I think the pizza problem is two-fold. Like Jewish Delis, ethnic Italians are exiting the business and selling the local shops. Instead of working 60 hours a week in the shop, the kids are mortgage brokers and IT guys. The other issue is that manufactured pizza components are better and cheaper. You can be a lower skill operator and still churn out a mediocre product. So a shitty local shop is using a similar premade dough and mediocre cheese that a chain is using. It’s really obvious to see in NYC. The same thing happened to bread.
- fsckboy 4y ago> Like Jewish Delis, ethnic Italians are exiting the business and selling the local shops. that was the problem a generation ago. The new problem is that very few customers now know what good pizza should/could taste like, they're not very "Italian" any more either.
- tyingq 4y agoMaybe regional, but most of the mom & pop pizza shop families around me are Albanian. The pizza is great.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> The biggest thing I have noticed is the decline in the amount of sauce put on slices. I’m sure this is a cost-saving measure, but the overall quality of your average slice in the city has definitely suffered. Isn't cheese more expensive than tomato sauce? Why would the restaurants skimp on a cheaper ingredient (tomatoes) instead of more expensive (cheese)?
- fsckboy 4y agothis is not a direct answer to your question, but cheese quality varies more than tomato quality, and NYC pizza in the inexpensive tier already switched to it's-not-really-cheese a few decades ago, so there is little room for saving except by withholding. Possibly customers want the very visible cheese-like product more than they want the sauce so scrimping on the cheese would turn more customers away?
- TylerE 4y agoThe big national brands did a big stealth price hike a few years ago when they took away free delivery. So that $15 pie is now about $25 or $26 by the time you add fees, taxes, and tip. Checking through old emails from Papa Johns (Garbage pizza, but sometimes you WANT garbage pizza.) I know it was free delivery at somepoint, but it's hard to pinpoint as prior to 2010 their emails didn't include a broken out receipt, just a total. But, in 2010 it was $1.99 then soon after went up to $2.50. In 2019 that was bumped to $2.75. No orders between late 2019 and early 2022. Early 2022 it was $4.49, then shortly after $4.79, then bumped to $4.99 in July, where it is as of my last order a few days ago.
- tyingq 4y agoThe shrinkflation thing is getting out of hand. Not pizza, but I like those Kaukauna brand almond covered cheese balls. They replaced the 10 ounce product with a 6 ounce one, and then charge 10% more for the smaller ball. Too bad Liam didn't track the average weight of the slices. I have a hunch that might have tracked down as well.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MisterTea 4y ago> That mouth-watering Pizza Hut pie you remember from 1992 isn't all nostalgia—every now and then I find single-location or small-chain joints that make pizza very similar to how I remember those tasting. 100% their pizza has changed from the 90's. There is a single location in Gettysburg that I ate at twice and LOVE it - Tommys Pizza on Steinwehr Ave. They even have the textured red plastic soda "glasses" that Pizza Hut used. Solid old school Pizza Hut.