Word: dominoed
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Pizza eaters - which is to say, the entire U.S. population - were recently treated to a strangely satisfying spectacle when Domino's admitted, once and for all, that they actually made really crappy pizza. To atone for their sins, they announced, they redesigned their pies "from the crust up." The not-to-be-missed mea culpa video features ashen-faced executives responding like Soviet show-trial prisoners to customer complaints, which run along the lines of "totally void of flavor," "tastes like cardboard" and "the worst excuse for pizza I ever...
...really shocking? Even Domino's spokesman Tim McIntyre admits that the company was never primarily concerned with flavor. "Our core strength for 50 years is delivery convenience," he told me. And it's not as if a subpar product was doing that much damage to its business; the chain is still firmly entrenched as the No. 2 pizza source in the world (behind Pizza Hut). The fact is that the Domino's reboot isn't that great. I just had one. It's slightly softer and greasier now, in an enjoyable way. Whatever. The point is not the taste itself...
...Domino's won't say why exactly they took this dramatic step, but I suspect that the company realized they needed to pre-empt rivals scrambling to supplant them as America's worst-case dinner option. "The competition is incredibly fierce," McIntyre says. "We saw that consumers' tastes changed, that they do evolve, that there's more competition." (See the top 10 food trends...
...were during the Korean War. Nor has gnarly, underseasoned and overcrusted fried chicken improved much. But pizza is growing and breathing; it seems to have a special place in America. Maybe it's because pizza's the most domesticated of all our dishes, meant to be eaten at home. (Domino's, Papa John's and the other delivery outfits don't even have tables in their stores.) (See the 10 worst fast food meals...
...ever look at a Quarter Pounder quite the same way after you've eaten a Shake Shack burger in New York, or Taco Bell after you've had the real thing in East L.A., even brief exposure to good pizza ruins you for the likes of Domino's or Pizza Hut. There's a night-and-day technical difference between the crisp but pliable, barely yielding quality of fresh pizza crust, especially with the telltale little scorch marks that come from passing through a real oven, and the Wonder-bread-like dough of its assembly-line rivals. As someone...