Geekin' Out

The pictured object is made of Legos. If you don't know what that is, then please turn in your geek license. For those of you who never earned your geek license in the first place, it's a character from the original Legend of Zelda game, soon to be up for sale again, thanks to the evil machinations of the Nintendo machine.

Next-gen console fervor is building to a fever pitch, with both the Wii and the PlayStation 3 coming out in the next couple of weeks. I'm unlikely to buy a PS3 because it's stupidly expensive, and unless it pulls off some miraculous coups in the marketing and distribution department, it's not going to have many good games either (that's a function of market share). There was recently a survey in GameDeveloper magazine where Sony was trolling for suggestions on how to deal with the (very) negative PS3 buzz, and my first thought was "How about going back in time and refusing to allow your Blu-ray team to saddle your console team with an unproven and excessively expensive technology?" Is a dual-sided 8-gig DVD just not enough space for you?

The Wii, on the other hand, has been doing a brilliant job of building buzz and interest. It's a great example of massive R&D investment paying off. I might buy one of those, mostly cause I want to show it off to people.

A recent project of mine is trying to find a decent pizza somewhere in Utah Valley. Since most people don't have quite the single-minded dedication or budget that I have, I figure that I can save you all a little time. Please note that for judgement purposes, I nearly always get the cheese pizza--if they can't make a cheese pizza delicious, I'm not particularly interested in slathering it in toppings to try and save it. How hard can it be to make really good crust, really good sauce, and use really good cheese? Very difficult, apparently. So here are some initial results:

The absolute best pizza, with a commanding lead, is Papa Murphy's Take-n-Bake. It's not even funny how big the difference is. It's not as good as, say, that really great stuff I had in Brooklyn, but it's close. The main downside is that you have to take it home and bake it.

Another really good place is "The Pie" in Salt Lake City. It's just next to the University of Utah, and they will cook it for you. Unfortunately, it's not in Utah Valley, and I still like Papa Murphy's better. Papa Murphy's isn't quite as greasy.

There are quite a few places that have respectably good pizza. Olive Garden is very tasty, and Sbarro's at University Mall does a very decent cheese pizza (nearly as good as the Pie's, I think) -- although you have to get it fresh. I neither hate nor love Brick Oven, though to be fair to them I need to try a cheese pizza there.

There are also a great many places that make merely decent pizza. Smoke House brags about their pizza, but they use a precooked crust for selling by the slice, and that kind of kills them. They also can't seem to make up their mind whether they want to make Chicago-style pizza or New York-style pizza, and they end up at kind of an odd compromise. California Pizza Kitchen has okay sauce and cheese, but the crust tasted like a prebaked pastry.

There are also a few places that just disappointed. There's a place called "The Wooden House" (I think) on State Street that does charcoal grilled pizza. They use good cheese, and the charcoal grilling really does make an amazing crust, but their sauce is terrible. It's actually sour, and reminded me of those heinous squares of pizzafood you'd get in elementary school. If they would switch to a decent sauce then they could be good (though cleaning the place up would help too). Papa John's talks big, but all three times I've had them recently the cheese was manky. It might be a different story if you eat in. The Napoli place (near Albertson's on the parkway) does well on thin-crust pizzas, but when I got a thick-crust pizza it actually came out raw in the middle. A raw crust is an instant failing mark. I did like the thin crust stuff, but I don't think I can bring myself to eat there again.

I'm still trying places out--I intend on trying Pier 49 soon, and I intend to give Smoke House a better shot by ordering a full pizza (and hopefully getting it made from scratch) one of these days. If anyone wants to help me eat a pizza, I could use the assistance. I also haven't really put too much consideration into Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, or Domino's, but I hope I will be forgiven for ignoring them. I also can't pursue this too faithfully or I'm going to blow up like a big blubber-filled balloon.

The long and short of it is that I really wish somone would figure out how they make that pizza sauce in Brooklyn. I've found really good crusts here, and there's only so many ways to mess up on cheese, but nobody has figured out how to make the magic sauce yet. Until then, Papa Murphy's it is.