A greasy, mottled slab, about an inch thick. Crust the density of a hearty kitchen sponge. A few withered pepperonis trapped in slick elastic cheese, the kind you can peel off the entire slice intact. The box claims this is pizza, Domino's pizza to be exact, but I'm not buying it.
Look, I'll be the first to admit that people from New York City and New Jersey talk a lot of garbage about how marvelous their home states are while simultaneously clawing over each other to escape them, but when it comes to pizza they tell no lies. The pizza really is better where they come from.
Here, in Durham and in North Carolina, pizza is largely how I've described it in the first paragraph. It comes in a box marked with the logo of a major franchise, and it is a sad state of affairs, a semblance of a pie, to be consumed quickly and thoughtlessly, usually while doing something else.
In New York City, pizza is more akin to an affirmation of the diverse ways in which life is awesome, and should be celebrated. There your pizza is made by stern Italian men who treat it like a craft, making their own sauces, tweaking cheese combinations, even traveling to Italy periodically to hone their skills.
The living embodiment of New York's commitment to pizza can be found at Di Fara's in Brooklyn, a pizza joint I visited while living in New York for the summer. Like many of the best places, it's nondescript, short on decor, and looks like nothing's been added or removed from the walls for at least the last thirty years. It's owned by the DeMarco family, and aging patriarch Dom DeMarco handles all the pizza-making duties personally, from slicing tomatoes for the sauce (he sometimes makes several batches a day) to selecting the precise combination of imported cheeses to finish the pie.
No matter how busy it gets, Dom is the only one allowed to touch the pies, which means you wait, usually a very long time. So you hang out, talk to friends, talk to other people waiting, stare at archaic photos of a young Dom behind the counter. When the pizza finally arrives, half the time it's not even close to what you ordered.
It doesn't matter. You accept it gratefully, and eat it slowly, with a quiet joy, for Dom is a master and this is truly quality pizza. Given the excellence of Di Fara's and other New York institutions, recent trends in the city's pizza scene are disturbing.
A couple months back the New York Post ran an article titled "Pizza Wars Heat Up," concerning the gains the four largest franchises-Papa John's, Pizza Hut, Domino's and Sbarro--were making in Manhattan. During the past five years, according to the article, the number of new chain restaurants on the island increased by 80 percent, and increasingly franchises are monopolizing the delivery trade.
This "80 percent increase" amounts to a grand total of 36 chain stores in all of Manhattan. This is a power struggle, pure and simple, and I fear that once again places like Di Fara's are going to be the losers.
The major chains emphasize their speed and convenience. Pizza Hut's advertising is filled with images of busy, go-getter modern families, grabbing a slice on the way to karate and soccer practice. Their website talks about the "rapid pace of modern living" and "the subsequent demand by consumers for convenience." When I buy one of their pizzas, it seems like I'm being liberated from something, like I now have more time on my hands and more freedom to do what I want.
But this increased freedom of choice offered by franchise pizza places is fake. Choosing Domino's and convenience means I can't choose inconvenience and quality pizza, even if that's what I actually want. I might save time by ordering from a chain, but I'll probably end up wishing I had spent that time waiting in line at Di Fara's anyway.
What Pizza Hut and the other franchises are selling me is not only a pizza but a entire lifestyle of ease and efficiency, one completely at odds with New York's traditional pizza culture and the ethos of a Di Fara's. Ideally the two could coexist, but franchises tend to be very good at what they do, and one of the things they do is run the local competition out of business. It isn't anything sinister on the part of the franchise, but unless you watch the process closely you'll find your choices have been made for you, before you even realized what was happening.
Durham is no New York City, but there's a similar dynamic at work here. Franchise pies from Domino's and Papa John's rule the market, while local vendors (of which there are many) struggle for a slice of the action. What makes the situation even more difficult for the locals is their lack of access to undergraduates through the Merchants on Points system. It's very costly for vendors to become a Merchant on Points, and while franchises can typically muster up the capital to be added to the system, many smaller local ventures simply can't afford it. Durham mom-and-pops are going up against one hell of a convenient system, and from the amount of turnaround in local restaurants, it appears that they're losing.
It would be nice if the administration would change this, lowering the cost for joining or subsidizing non-franchise Durham eateries, but the school makes a lot of money off the merchants program, and has little economic incentive to alter it. For now, at least, it's left to the student body. Next time you order a pie, try something local, something probably made with a little more concern for quality and a little less for efficiency. I'm sure Dom DeMarco, if he knew, would thank you.
Brian Kindle is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Tuesday.
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