A satirical review of ---, a real pizza place in Ithaca, NY

My husband and I had the memorable experience of eating the most disappointing pizza of our lives on a work trip last October. For our own amusement, we wrote a satirical review together of the restaurant that we intended to post on Google Reviews, but ultimately decided it might just ruin the owner's day, and being self-employed myself I know how that would feel and I didn't want to do that to anyone. So I share it here, with the name redacted, and hope it provides someone with a laugh instead of a sigh.

. . .

 Review of ——— in Ithaca, NY

We visited Ithaca for a weekend last fall for a physics workshop at Cornell. Our first choice for dinner was Franco’s Pizzeria downtown, which looked really good. Google Maps took us to the wrong parking lot, but we got there eventually — only to find out they were closed that weekend during Cornell’s fall break to do renovations. 😢 So we picked ——— as a second option. 

Atmosphere: like a carry-out-only Waffle House for pizza (floor was a little sticky like Waffle House, too). We decided to order their version of a Margherita, which seemed safe. We’ve collectively eaten a lot of pizza over the years 🍕, and you usually can’t go wrong with a Margherita! Little did we know we were about to eat the worst pizza either of us have ever tasted. 🫥 Six months later we are still talking about it (“At least it’s not as bad as that pizza in Ithaca”). Instead of fresh, flavorful tomatoes, these were whole stewed tomatoes — seemingly from a can. Have you ever had a pizza where every bite was consumed by a whole canned tomato? If there was fresh basil on that pizza like the menu alleges, it was so overshadowed by the tomatoes that we don’t remember it. Not to mention the cheese was in large, unmelted clumps and the sauce tasted weird and sweet. Overall, it was a strange combination of flavors.

We also ordered a Caesar salad, which again seemed like a safe choice. Unfortunately we didn’t check inside the box before we left, and only noticed after we opened the salad back in our hotel room that there was cold garlic shrimp on our salad. Why was there so much shrimp on a Caesar salad?? We eventually realized they probably gave us a different salad from the menu, one that came with garlic shrimp, pineapple habanero dressing, and pickled tomatoes. 😱 As with the pizza, it was a strange combination of flavors.

Eating the food was like going to work at a job that you don’t enjoy. You don’t go because you are passionate about your work. You go for the paycheck. We did not eat the food because we liked it. We ate the food because we needed the calories… We were desperate. But the more we ate, the less we wanted to keep eating… so eventually we stopped. One of us had to eat the leftovers for lunch the following day (you do what you’ve got to do) — normally I avoid the microwave but there was no way I was eating those whole tomatoes cold, so I made an exception just to make it through. We ended up tossing the salad though — just couldn’t do it.

We still talk about this pizza to this very day… It was memorable. We really enjoy good pizza, but we have to admit that we talk about this place far more often than the good ones — we remember this as the worst pizza we have found so far. Perhaps your experience here will be better than ours — they seemed kind of new, so maybe they’re still figuring things out. There is only one way to find out, but be prepared for some memories. For pizza, request no tomatoes. For salad, request no shrimp. Try ordering some other menu items. If Franco’s Pizzeria is open, go there and let us know how it is.

P.S. I love writing satirical pieces. If you enjoyed this, perhaps let me know in a comment if you'd like to read more of this sort of thing?

A venture into satire

In which I share:

A Decolonized Review of Peasants into Frenchmen

   A cheeky homage to my years of graduate school

First off, I'd like to give Mr. Weber credit for managing to get this book published. I don't think I could have convinced an editor to accept this manuscript, but it helps that he has blue eyes, is male, and especially that he has the privilege of being a literate human being.

I take issue with the premise of this book. Prof. Weber would like to examine the incorporation of rural peasants in France into the French imagined community. Even an undergraduate can see how Eurocentric a book on French people in France is. Prof. Weber also used mainly French primary sources, which raises accessibility and justice issue for readers who do not speak French.

On the subject of sources, I was more than a little upset than Weber only cites Das Kapital once. I know that Marx was German, that DK was written 30 years before this book begins, and that this is a social and cultural history not about the nineteenth-century intellectual milieu, but as Weber says in the introduction, there were socialists in France, so I am shocked that he did not include a thorough analysis of the one socialist text I know (unless it was in chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, or 27, because I admit I didn't read those).

Finally, I don't understand why Weber did not complement his analysis with comparisons to 1970s America, which would have been useful and more interesting to me. I kept thinking he would go there, but he never quite did. To be sure, this would have added another 200 pages and the book is already too long, at 500 pages. Perhaps he could have cut out some of that stuff on France to save space.