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Reasons not to eat the best pizza in the world

September 10, 2010

by David Sigal and Duncan Robertson

As college students, we are far from connoisseurs of pizza. The standard, Saturday night, past 1 a.m. fare is starchy and effective at cutting through our bouts of late-night hunger, but hardly something to get excited about.

Unfortunately, it represents the lion’s share of the pizza we eat on a day-to-day basis. Even though we’ve had pizza in New York, Chicago and in Italy, before we had Apizza Scholls it was all just pizza: cheese, sauce and meat that varies slightly in edibility. Apizza Scholls stands apart, with pizza that can be considered an addictive fix; you wake up the next morning and you want more. You need more. And like fixes, Apizza Scholls has massive side effects.

Apizza Scholls is not a pizzeria where you simply acquire a slice and move on. You have to wade, waist-deep, through a plaid-shirted sea of pretension, bad attitudes and smug hipsters, impressive even by competitive Portland standards. Even the process of arranging your meal is a challenge. Apizza Scholls has a phone, but it doesn’t get answered. And it wouldn’t matter if they did, because Apizza Scholls doesn’t take to-go orders, unless you walk in, and they only take one reservation a night for parties of eight or larger.

Having arrived, you sign your name on to a list that is perverse in its length, and requires you to record the number of pizzas you intend to eat. This is so they know when they’ll run out of pizza dough, which they do regularly, and then simply do not make more.

While you wait for a minimum of an hour just to be seated, you get to watch people, less deserving of food, get served beautiful, bubbling hot pizzas. When you are finally seated, the skinny-jeaned, wide-rimmed glasses-wearing waiter does everything in his power to make you feel unwanted.

 

Between long fits of waiter-neglect, you’ll flip the menu and notice the humorless story about how Apizza Scholls is single-handedly carrying on the fine tradition of pizza-making as it was once done a century ago.

Apizza’s menu said, “We adhere to the principles of any great pizzaiolo whom laid the groundwork before us.”

 You’ll also notice that for the create-your-own pizza op- tion, a series of draconian rules have been set in place, limiting the number and variety of toppings you can apply to the pizza you’re trying to pay them for.

Make no mistake. At Apizza Scholls you have to earn your dinner. Like a hero’s quest you come out the other side changed for the better. When the pizza eventually arrives, all the stress of your entire life (afterwards, a friend of ours claimed that he could suddenly remember being born) evaporates, and you are reborn.