Food for thought: How to order the perfect pizza – and annoy a waiter or two

Despite the widespread idea that the cold pizza is the holy grail of leftover, it is in fact well known that pizza is to be tasted hot, straight from the oven. Super spicy or extra flavored U.S. style pizza might benefit from a night in the fridge but a classical Margherita, like the one in the photo, is at its best for only a few minutes since it is on your plate. That’s why it is somehow unnerving to realize that when you go out with your friends in the standard restaurant setting, you’ll eat your last slice when your pizza is already getting cold, no matter what: aside of the obvious fact that you cannot swallow your pizza in one bite, conversations will extend the time required to finish your pizza. That’s the way it is. That’s ‘the default’. One interesting solution would be to challenge this default scenario where you all get your pizza at the same time, and actually having them delivered to your table one after another, at an optimum interval. Imagine you and your friend have order two margherita: after some minutes your first pizza arrives; Only one! You cut it in two and you both start to eat it: warm and delicious. As soon as you finish it, the second one arrives, and once again you cut it in two and continue enjoying the superior experience of tasting a hot pizza until the last bite. There are tradeoffs of course: you need to be ready to share, so an agreement on the kind of pizza is needed: it would work fine with pairs, but it would be more complicated for groups. And the waiters might not be so keen in increasing the number of visits to the tables. But still, there is always room to check the default: I am going to try this in one month in Rome. I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

From Wikipedia: Picture of an authentic Neapolitan Pizza Margherita taken by Valerio Capello on September 6th 2005 in a pizzeria (“I Decumani”) located on the Via dei Tribunali in Naples.
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