Kind of badass.

Simply stated, there are just certain places you shouldn’t good to get certain things.

Think about it; when you want sushi, you don’t rush to a mini mall in a town of 5,000. I’d advise against venturing to either Dakota if you’re specifically searching for a hot piece of tail (though I once made out with a cute chick from Fargo). Families don’t, or at least shouldn’t, caravan to Washington D.C. just to see “a good baseball game”–even if they live in the D.C. area. In that same vein, very few people go to gas stations with the sole intention of getting a hot slice of pizza. But regional convenience store chain Kwik Trip (of selling milk in bags fame) not only stocks a myriad of pre-made Cheese Mountain Pizza beneath their heat lamps, they really, really push them on people. 

But somehow, I’d managed to resist the the onslaught of radio ads, TV commercials and in-store advertising that makes Avatar seem under-publicized by comparison. Maybe I wasn’t ready to have my mind blown. Maybe I didn’t feel as if I deserved to try Cheese Mountain Pizza. But probably, it was because they look fucking disgusting.

But when I found myself feeling peckish at the Kwik Trip of an off-ramp town I’d never heard of, I was faced with the difficult decision of whether to eat a Power Bar or a past-date chicken salad sandwich (The Sophie’s Choice of gas station dining dilemmas). It was then that I threw caution to the wind, wiped the sand out of my cooter, grew a dick and decided that I would finally traverse the Cheese Mountain.

I cringed before snagging the last two slices of the poetically-named “Four Meat” to go with my Lo-Carb Monster, and I shamefully walked to my car to eat kind of old gas station pizza alone in the parking lot. To take our gay and female readership over the top to an Earth shattering orgasm, I was also wearing a too-tight graphic wolf T-shirt. 

Sitting there in my 2002 Saturn, nibbling a greasy “Four Meat”er, I felt my soul leaving my body. It hovered above me and watched as I crushed both slices in record time so that I could get back on I-94… so I could get back on the road to speed both towards my home and away from the memory of what I’d just done. It was then that it dawned on me: Moments like those in places like that with people like me perfectly embody the reason gas stations sell pizza.

THE GOOD: There were generous toppings on each slice. As to be expected with a pizza called “Four Meat”, there was a lot meat on the pizza. Four to be exact. Four meat. Sausage, really thick pepperoni, chicken and Canadian bacon (actually an entire slice of deli ham) clung to each taxing bite. I’ll be honest; I’m guessing that the fourth meat was chicken. It was a riddle, really.

THE BAD: It was old as shit. The cheese was melted under the heat lamps then re-hardened on the box so I had to pull an Alan Grant just to excavate the slice from the container. The cheese was lukewarm, the sauce was bordering on cold and the greasy toppings were near boiling from heat lamp scorching. Its layers made it like a Neapolitan ice cream of pizza in where, instead of each being a different flavor of ice cream, they were each a different temperature of undesirable pizza. The rest was just grease. The crust almost squirted when I bit into it. I was the bearded, adult, ashamed version of one of those Ann Geddes baby prints.

I nearly poured gas on my skin just to get free use of the Kwik Trip’s chemical shower.

TRY: Planning ahead so you don’t almost run out of gas in an unincorporated township with no restaurants. That failing, I assume the Cheese Mountain take and bake pizzas are exponentially better than the pre-made slices. But if you possess the foresight to plan to buy a take and bake and have the resources in which to cook it, there’s literally EVERY better option for pizza anywhere else… including Kwik Trip’s frozen pizza selection.

RATING: -1 on the pizza scale. Wolfgang Puck on the gas station pizza scale. Bad as it was, it still made Hot Stuff Pizza taste like Piccadilly Circus Pizza by comparison.

Cheese Mountain Pizza, Corporate, Kwik Trip, T. Mario