Quick-Serve Pizza vs. "Normal" Pizza - Is One Always Better Than The Other?

[DonRocks]

I've eaten there once.  I thought it pretty good or okay.  Not memorable but I'd return.  Two minute pizza.  Lets face it.   That is fast.

An interesting question for you, or anyone who is interested: At what point does quick-serve pizza become better than "normal" pizza?

It would not surprise me one iota if I liked Spinfire more than Paisano's - I don't think I've ever had a quick-serve pizza that I didn't like more than the national chains - granted, I've only had a few, but I'm getting the picture. I also strongly suspect we're going to see a drop in overall quality as the market becomes flooded, but right now, it's still in a nascent state, and the quality seems to have held up (for the moment).

What the hell took it so long to get here? It seems like a no-brainer to me (which is why the market is being deluged).

[The Hersch]

Could we have a definition of terms here? What is "quick-serve" and what is "normal"? If "normal" means "national chains", then I think that's a pretty effed-up definition of normal. For example, I've had pizza from Domino's exactly once, and as I may have mentioned somewhere here before, at the time I thought that it didn't even seem like food (that was in the mid-90s). I hope that's not normal. On the other hand, with a proper pizza oven at a proper (i.e., screaming hot) temperature, a properly made pizza should take less than two minutes to bake, so that seems rather more like "normal" for pizza than otherwise.

All of the very best pizza I've ever eaten has been in Italy, and they don't mess around. It's fast, unless you're in a crowded place that doesn't get to your order until long after you've placed it. Some of the greatest pizzas I've been served have been in seemingly unlikely places. I particularly remember a little tourist place at the ruins of Paestum, where the pizza came out certainly less than five minutes after we ordered, and was ambrosial. Perhaps the very best pizza I've ever eaten was at a little place calling itself a "pizzorante" just off the autostrada in Brescia (in the north, where pizza was probably unknown 50 years ago). The place wasn't busy (I think it was late for lunch in Italy), and the pizza (actually pizze, my friend and I had one each) came out in about three minutes, and the maestro who had made it for us came out about five minutes later, when we had nearly finished devouring it, to ask if it was good. We assured him that it was.