I love quaint. I adore quaint. Give me the littlest barber shop in the quietest part of Texas with the nicest barber and, though I would not in a million years get my hair chopped there, I would fondly recall it for years to come.
The problem is that the protectors of small town old world charm are old now and they lost the keys to the kingdom. Those keys are probably in the refirgerator (it’s the last place you check!). Where once craftsmanship mattered now a bunch AARPing small town hustlers try to finagle you out of your mula with their shoddy worksmanship and coldly judgmental attitudes. Frankly I’ll take the warm glow of Walmart to the exclusive, elitist, over-priced crafts stores they put out of business any day. If I were to take a crafts store for anything, that is.
The pizzeria across from us… let’s call it Clifton… Neighborhood… Pizzeria… (because that is what it’s called) tried to sell me a pizza at full price which was burnt, blackened crusts, and overcooked onions. The whole thing was terrible with a capital T (I just wanted to say that so I didn’t actually write the terrible with a capital T.)
When we went to confront the pizza punk with a tender but accusational “why you trying to serve us burnt pizza?” The old man went into a rant about how “that’s-a how you make-a the pizza pie” and insisting that the bitter taste of ash we still could not wash out of our mouths was simply the remains of his grandmother’s secret recipe and not in fact her remains themselves.
After some heated verbal sparring, Takako finally came out and called the man’s bluff.
“If this pizza is good, try some. You eat it if you think it’s good. Why won’t you eat it? I know why, because it’s awful. It’s awful.”
Which was the final straw that broke this camel’s back. With an all too precious “Give these shitty people their money back and you-a get outta my store and you-a never come back” we were ejected from the premises.
Here’s what irks me. The guy saw the pizza looked like shit -one side was burnt and curling and it was flaking off on the bottom- and he still served it to us without even a word. Then, instead of apologizing and kowtowing to “the customer is always right” he turned it around and blamed me claiming that if I wanted a not-burnt pizza I should have ordered it “light”.
I think that’s the point where I lost all sympathy I had for the old dinosaur and decided that his extinction couldn’t come fast enough.
In closing I offer the store a new slogan for their window:
Clifton Neighborhood Pizzeria: Our pizzas burnt to order!
We’re such a naughty couple.
