Lame logo for lame pizza.

Sorry I haven’t contributed here lately. I’ve been up to other things, like writing a musical based on the life of Andre the Giant, writing shit about plays that are about dogs and fucking, and generally doing important shit like ruining the days of 12-year-olds on Halo Reach. But it’s not like I haven’t eaten pizza; my doctor, who I recently saw for the first time in like five years assured me that I am indeed still obese, a pizza lover, and headed to a heart-attack filled grave. When I asked him how he knew I love pizza, he looked at me, and said, “Because of that pepperoni on your chin.”

The problem is, I haven’t eaten much new pizza. I’ve balled down on plenty of Rossi’s, eaten at Roman Candle, (not) mourned the loss of Gumby’s, and eaten (roughly) 100 frozen pizzas. The only new place I’ve tried was Rosati’s, a place so thoroughly inoffensive and unmemorable, that I forgot I ate there when I discussed not writing pizza reviews much any more with my roommate. “I don’t eat at places we haven’t ate anymore,” I said. “Yes you do. We ate at that one place before Social Network,” he said. “I hate you so much,” I said.  The Good: You should know Rosati’s in Madison (at least the one on the west side) isn’t directly affiliated with the Rosati’s Chicago-style pizza chain. It has the same menu and everything, but it’s not affiliated with the chain that has operated for 50 years in Chicago, or the one on the east side that is basically in Sun Prairie (which I’m told sucks dong). But enough with the background on pizza chain affiliates and onto the ‘za.

The pizza comes in three different types, basically a pan style, a super huge pan style, and a fucking enormous pan style that promises to be an obelisk of bread and cheese. My roommates and I went with the middle option, and it was pretty okay. Unlike Brett Favre’s penis, the pizza was thick, it was stiff, it could please a woman, and it didn’t wear Crocs. But…

The Bad: It was huge and bland. It was like taking five one-pound bags of shredded cheese from the grocery store and cooking it on top of a pile of pepperoni and a loaf of bread. It entirely gets wrong the original spirit of Chicago style pizza: It’s not about how high you can make the crust, it’s about how good you can make your sauce. Think about it; that well of crust allows pizza makers to show off their sauce in a way that New York pizza doesn’t allow. Instead, chains like Uno’s and Rosati’s pile on the crust and the cheese, leaving very little sauce. Which in Rosati’s case, might be a good thing, since their sauce also tasted like it was store-bought. I mean, my mom makes pizza just like this, and I don’t have to pay $18 for a medium that takes 30 minutes to cook. Also, mom, if you’re reading this (I hope not), that Brett Favre penis joke was for you. Happy birthday? And Christmas too?

Try: One of my roommates had a gnarly looking Chicago-style hot dog that looked pretty rad, as Rosati’s offers more than just za. Other than that, just try finding a Rocky’s instead.

Rating: Like Ben Roethlisberger in a bar, the pizza comes on strong but…I have no joke for this.

“You should eat Rossi’s. It’s in Monona, and it’s the best pizza on the planet. It’s how pizza should be. You say you like Ian’s? Blegh. It’s gross compared to Rossi’s.”

I think I answered noncommittally out of fear, but holy shit, dude was on to something. There’s a giant ass sign outside of Rossi’s that calls it the best pizza on the planet too, and it’s probably the first sign that is totally true since that one I saw that asked if I was tired while driving when I totally was. Rossi’s is hands-down the best pizza I’ve had in my short time in Madison, to the point where I’m not even sure if it’s worth eating anywhere else. Which isn’t exactly the thing you want to feel when you review pizza for fun. Am I right, ladies?

The Good: Is there a way to put down everything here? I mean, Rossi’s travels in a fluffy thin crust that reminds me not of the cracker thin crust you can’t avoid in Wisconsin, but the kind of pizza I ate on my trip to NYC in 2004. The toppings come together like some Justice League of taste-bud asskickery, and they wreak havoc on the forces of evil congealing in your lower intestines. It’s like a fucking Picasso masterwork of pizza, pretty much. Plus their pizza comes in comically huge sizes, specifically a 20-inch and 30-inch variety, which is just bonkers. Though even a huge pizza can’t satiate you entirely on this stuff; my roommates and I mowed through a 20-inch in 15 minutes, and we all cried tears of sadness when we realized what he had done. It was that good. We should have known something seriously awesome was going down in that place: in the window by the kitchen, they have a giant tub of garlic. Any place with a giant tub of garlic in the window is basically the bestest.

And I haven’t even gotten to the Bosco sticks, these sticks of unholy concoction that are basically breaded logs of string cheese that are as addictive as uncut cocaine. Those are good too.

The Bad: Rossi’s has weird hours (only open at dinner, pretty much) and it’s take-out only. Though I don’t know if you’d want to eat there, since it looks like the room where me and my cousins were sequestered in my grandma’s house when she used to make what she called “turkey” at Thanksgiving. Which is to say, it smelled like an old person, had upholstered furniture, was dusty as a motherfucker, and looked as though the interior hadn’t been considered since about 1971. And it’s actually underneath another restaurant, called Rossitano’s, which is confusing as hell. But this doesn’t mean anything vis a vis the pizza.

Try: Fitting a 30-inch pizza into your car. One of the funniest pizza-related things I’ve ever seen was watching a delivery driver come out of the place carrying a box that had a 30-inch pizza. That’s too many trees and too much pizza, there, fella! Then he had to empty his trunk to put the pizza in, which was worth a few more giggles.

Rating: Hard to say, but I feel like Shit Just Got Real

I make a-da Italians feel-a bad about dere heritage.

Just like every other college-educated, self-loathing white son of middle class parents who lives in Madison, I read the A.V. Club and The Onion too much. So let me break with what’s expected of me and link to an A.V. Club story in the next paragraph:

When I started considering writing a review of Rocky Rococo’s, Wisconsin’s pre-eminent corporate pizza chain a whole 36 hours ago, I ran across this Inventory running down movies in which the police detective is told he is too close to a case, and couldn’t help parallel (again, no one else parallels their lives to something they read in the Onion, and by no one, I mean everyone) that list with this review. Am I too close to Rocky’s to write a review of the Italian stereotype-furthering chain? Probably.

You see, I worked at Rocky’s for entirely too long, from the fall of 2002 till the late summer of 2007. I literally did every job you could do at Rocky’s, from starting out as a QC– the guy who cuts the pizzas–to getting laid off for two months by a manager who hated me because I didn’t like him (for the record, I never hated him, just disliked him). I then got rehired as a dishwasher, and worked my way back up to Prep—making pizzas—to delivery driver, and then to Shift Manager. I then resigned and worked as a delivery driver again, and made the pizza dough at seven in the morning two days a week.

I mean, I’ve cleaned shit-filled plugged toilets at Rocky’s. I got to help fire a dude from Rocky’s. I’ve technically stolen breadsticks from Rocky’s. I ate roughly 1,500 slices of pizza from Rocky’s (at least five slices a week for four years). I had to throw out old jeans because they didn’t fit any more because of Rocky’s. I had a guy steal pizza from me when I was on a delivery from Rocky’s. I nearly killed a motorcyclist the same shift. I slept in the office at Rocky’s. I’ve seen what their enormous sausage looks like when it’s not been made into patties, and it’s fucking gross. I’ve thrown up in a trashcan at Rocky’s. I sat on boxes of vegetables in the cooler when the air conditioner broke at Rocky’s. I paid for college by working at Rocky’s. I have permanent calluses in the “L” between my pointer fingers and thumbs because I burned my hands every day at Rocky’s.

So am I too close to Rocky’s to write this review? You bet your sweet ass, I am. But one of us pizza-loving fucks has to do it, and since I’ve got some time to kill between now and when I go to work, here it goes:

The Good: Rocky’s is basically the best available chain in Wisconsin, as it straight annihilates Pizza Hut’s butt, Papa John’s john, and Domino’s moldy ball sack. But it used to be a venerable Madison institution, like Ian’s before Ian’s. But after it went corporate in the ‘80s, it lost some of its magic. It’s now basically the place where you take your mouth-breathing kids when they want to play arcade games (at least at the Madison locations that have games) and you don’t want to eat the gonorrhea on a crust that is a Chuck E. Cheese ‘za.

But still, the attention to pizza-making craft is on a higher level than that of other chains. The crust is hand-made, and the toppings are generally fresh and delicious.  The whole-wheat crust might be the best crust on earth, and their sausage is famous the world over (at least from Appleton to Milwaukee and La Crosse), but it’s really more of a meatball. I still get a laugh whenever I think about how all the corporate handbooks said the sausage had to be three fingers. That’s what she said, am I right, guys?

The Bad: The main problem with Rocky’s is the fact that any pizza you buy might be way too doughy and uncooked in the middle. That’s the perils of ordering a pizza that is about 12 pounds of dough. I could never understand how people could order zas from Rocky’s with 8 toppings, because even they had to know that shit wasn’t going to be cooked right. Plus the fact that I am writing this after taking a break to eat a ‘za from Pizza Extreme should tell you something: Rocky’s isn’t going to beat your local place. But then again, that’s coming from someone who has eaten way too much Rocky’s.

Try: I loved a slice called the Motherlode, which is a promotional slice that is available every once in a while, and features stuffed crust. Rocky’s stuffed crust is made with smoked mozzarella, which is basically the best. For non-promotional times, you can’t go wrong with an Uncle Sal’s on whole-wheat.

Rating: Less offensive to Italians than all of the Mario Games (minus Mario Party 5), but equally offensive to that dude named Big Pussy on The Sopranos.

I Didn't Eat At One Of These. Do They Actually Work?

Buffets are meant to increase the national obesity average, lower the overall hygienics of restaurant eating, and because of the powerful gold pole and long window company needed a market for their wares in the 1940s (look it up). And, let’s be adults here: Buffets exist because of fat people. It’s not like a svelte cross-country runner is going to find great happiness at a Golden Corral. No, it takes the kind of person who eats not until their body tells them to stop, but the kind of person who eats until their food starts coming out of their every orifice in petroleum jelly-consistency reams of sweat.

To my (somewhat) dismay, I am the target market for buffets. Tell me there’s a place where I can get bacon, French toast, steak, packets of jam, an omelet, mashed potatoes, more bacon, pizza, and food I can’t readily identify on a single plate, and I’ll be there, early grave be damned.

I mention this because this is precisely how I ended up in a strip mall in Monona, far outside the three square mile area where I play out my meager existence, at a place called Pizza Oven (try Googling it: it’s seriously impossible) nearly going face down into a plate full of pizza and breadsticks. I learned a very important lesson that day: Don’t go to a pizza buffet before working an eight hour shift stocking shelves at a big box store. You will have to take multiple bathroom breaks just to wipe the sweat out of your ass.

The Good: You’re not going to a pizza buffet because you like the pizza; you’re going to eat a shitload of food in a short period of time. Which is to say if quality mattered, Shakey’s would have been shut down 10 years ago. But the Pizza Oven pizza buffet pizza was actually pretty good; it was a middle ground between thin and hand-tossed, and the toppings were pretty okay (though the slice I ate with banana peppers tasted like death). The price was reasonable (like seven bucks), and because I went at a slow time (noon on a Monday), the waitress/cashier asked us what we liked, and they made fresh pies for us to eat about 10 minutes after we got there.

But what was totally unexpected was the sheer awesomeness of the breadsticks, which I can’t really describe in a way that doesn’t become a long riff on wiener-shaped bread products. Just know them shits are bomb, so if you ever end up at the Pizza Oven, put some of those bready dongs in between your teeth.

The Bad: Pizza Oven is the kind of place I imagine the guys I knew in high school who drove rusty pickups would take their girlfriends out on dates, because it’s got an area that can be charitably referred to as an arcade (though they do have dome hockey, which is the best arcade game of all time) and an area where consumption of Coors Light seems like a certainty (also known as a “bar”).

Thusly, the musical selection in the joint is programmed accordingly: All country, all the time. Obviously, this sucks (except for when a Taylor Swift song comes on, obviously, and by obviously I mean it’s very, very bad when a Taylor Swift song comes on), and sucks hard. My one character flaw is that I can’t enjoy stuffing my face if the soundtrack isn’t good. I mean, one of my favorite pizza eating memories is crushing a Little Caesar’s pizza while listening to the White Stripes’ Elephant for the first time, and Little Caesar’s is just the worst. And that time I ate at Mesa Pizza when they played The Blueprint from front-to-back was awesome as shit, too.

Plus the daytime environment is a little bit too business casual for me, since I felt like a deviant for wearing a Wu-Tang Clan t-shirt and making “that’s what she said jokes” with my roommate . Granted, we were seated next to a pregnant office worker and her clearly offended supervisor. Sorry ladies. I can’t help myself. It’s too hard. That’s what she said.

Try: Ignoring the fifth Brad Paisley song you heard in 20 minutes along with avoiding eating so much you feel like you might die of sauce-related infarctions the next day.

Rating: Snazzier than the Pizzazz, but less functional than those steel pizza ovens.

A Sign on the Door Says "You Can't Afford This"

If you know me, and you totally probably don’t, you know that I’m not exactly the type of bro who likes fine dining. To be quite honest, the best meals of my life were eaten at a shitty coffee table while I was dressed in sweatpants with a hole in the crotch and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt that fit better when my man-boobs were two cup sizes smaller. When I go to any restaurant where fried food isn’t the predominant foodstuff and Hall and Oates isn’t featured on the in-house stereo, I stick out like a white guy in a N.W.A. band photo.

So it’s with great surprise to my friends (primarily my roommate, who is a total dick, and  who claims I don’t know how to use a fork and knife) that I speak of the virtues of Paisan’s, basically the finest pizza joint in a city of hole-in-the-wall joints piled atop hole-in-the-wall joints. I mean, they have actual table cloths there, the floors and walls are made out of what looks to be very expensive wood, they’re in the bottom of a fancy place downtown and they have a lake front view. If you went to Paisan’s without knowing what they serve there, you’d assume they’d be serving some minimalist fusion of Polish and Vietnamese cuisine. Instead, they serve some of the crispiest thin crust in town.

The Good: Paisan’s is somehow able to have the best of both thick and thin crust, as the innards of their pizza are fluffier than a profile of Oprah in Oprah Magazine, while the outside is crunchy and delicate. The toppings are top notch, and the cheese is probably some of the best tasting I’ve ever had. Plus the awesome ability to gawk at people out on the lake while you go face down in a large sausage (that’s what she said) cannot be understated: It’s totally jawesome. (Obviously I am a professor of all things view-related.) Paisan’s used to be in a strip mall near the university; so obviously, the new place is a huge upgrade. It’s like when Tom Brady went from that pregnant actress to that one model (except without the being a total dick thing).

The Bad: To get a large pizza at Paisan’s, you have to take out a second mortgage on your house, or like me, you have to whore yourself out to 30 women for a dollar each or charge a half a woman $60. Seriously, the reason Paisan’s can afford the rent on their Wilson Street location (it sits between John Nolen and Wilson Street, which means got an incredible, 270-degree view of Lake Monona) is because people have to resort to contract murder to afford to eat at the place. It’s like $25 for a 14 inch pizza, which maybe doesn’t seem like much, but for the same price you can get like 10 pizzas at Gumby’s or three pizzas at Pizza Extreme. Though Paisan’s is terribly resplendent.

Try: A large sausage and roni is my fave, but the vegetables are also a top draw, since those are fresh and delicious (peep the onions, especially, since they come standard on every pizza unless you ask for them to be removed). For appetizers, try their bombass spicy cheese bread, which will reduce even the brawniest of men to weeping bitches.

Rating: Five out of five iPods.*

*- That’s a 30 Rock reference, because like Paisan’s, that show is beloved by upper-middle class whites, and ignored by everyone else.

Is Pokey giving Gumby a handy? I'd bet so.

Like the green rubbered fellow that gives the place its namesake, Gumby’s Pizza in Madison has seen better days. Which is basically like a nice way of saying it’s a shitpile, but still; when I went there recently, they had just been raided by the local Pepsi distributor who took all of their Pepsi back due to delinquent bills. The dude working there said it was because corporate didn’t pay a bill (it apparently had nothing to do with him), which is pretty gnarly to think about, since Pepsi apparently has collection people who will come and yank out soda fountains at the drop of a hat. Plus they didn’t actually have pans to serve the pizza on, so we ate ours right out of the box. They did have paper plates at least. But even the fucking stone Gumby they have in there is torn the hell up. Seriously, he looks less put together than Lil Wayne.

But the fact that I had to drink warm tap water out of a sink in back didn’t prevent the place from having some kind of charm; it’s basically the stereotypical stoner delight that can’t really exist elsewhere in Wisconsin. The dude working the oven seemed stoned. The guy working the counter seemed stoned. And they actually laughed about how bad their customer service is, while still seeming somewhat embarrassed about the whole no soda, no pan thing. If it was a Pizza Hut chain in Stevens Point, someone would have shut it down years ago for it being a dump. In Madison, this place could be a local favorite for years.

It somehow went from being horrifically awful to being kind of charming. It’s nice when the guy running the place takes a break from his cigarette break (which happens right on the balcony that overlooks State Street) to ask if he can get you anything else. It’s even better when he pours you a refill of warm tap water out of the sink in back in between laughing at how he can’t understand why anyone would eat there.

The Good: The price, mainly, which is really cheap. There was some kind of deal we got that involved getting a menu item of lesser value for free if you buy a large pizza. To be honest, I never quite got the specifics of the deal because the monumentally stoned delivery driver kept interrupting and making the whole thing seem like they were making shit up as they went along. Which is probably half true. So we got a large pizza and a large order of Pokey Stix for like $15.

The best menu item is the Pokey Stix, which are named after Gumby’s horse/sexual partner (seriously, they had to be fucking each other, right? I mean, who lives with a horse for their whole life and isn’t fucking/being fucked by said horse? Matthew Broderick? HO!). Basically, they’re Toppers Stix with a shit ton of garlic. Which makes them way awesome. The only problem is the whole shitting gallons of garlic six to eight hours after consumption.

The Bad: Gumby’s Pizza (which is apparently a full chain, though I’d never heard of it until I moved here) comes from a sub-genus of pizza I affectionately call the “Hot Garbage Genus.” This pizza fits all the qualities that you expect from pizza (it’s reasonably warm, has cheese, some kind of meat/sauce) but it’s basically garbage. There is a time and place for Hot Garbage pizza, and most of those times involve being broke and/or drunk and/or having no taste buds. Gumby’s is solidly in the middle of the Hot Garbage Genus, slotting somewhere above Pizza Hut, Pizza Pit and Papa John’s, but somewhere below Topper’s (contrary to popular belief, Domino’s doesn’t fit in this genus; it belongs to the “Actual Shit” genus).

Try: The Pokey Stix. And getting a medium Pepsi. It sounds like I’m harping on that point, but I ended up not caring; it was just really, really sad. Going to Gumby’s is like watching an old porn star film a scene; the motions of a pizza place are there, they’re just not able to finish on your face.

Rating: Equal to actually having to watch an episode of Gumby.

Phallic symbol extreme!

www.pizzaextreme.biz

What does it take to go viral? Easy answer is a communicable disease like HIV or HPV. But what if you’re not talking about spreading an infection of the body? Instead you’re talking about spreading an infection of the collective conscious. Well, the criteria for successfully globalizing your message is most easily ascertained from the latest stupid bullshit that everyone is blabbing about around the water cooler: “Pants on the Ground,” by “General” Larry Platt, the latest in a long line of mentally handicapped people exploited made famous by American Idol.

Before I can tell you how this applies to pizza, let me tell you how I can now meet the criteria set forth by the “General.” First, I have a message that I want to get across, much like his plea for proper pants positioning in public. Second, I can sing like shit and do so to the tune of “Pants on the Ground.” And last of all, I am too old for American Idol, as T. Mario and Tenderoni can attest.

A week ago, if you had offered me a slice of Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, I would have told you and your fucking slice of pizza to go get fucked. I hated that shit and its deliberate backwards-ass pizza assembly methodology. Much like the upper middle class gets all huffy when someone lays carpet over a hardwood floor, I would literally see red whenever someone completely obscured all the luscious cheese and toppings under a boring (albeit delicious) pile of sauce. Who would want to eat something so stupid looking?

But now I’ve tried the Chicago-style deep-dish pizza at Pizza Extreme and everything I thought I knew is shit. Tenderoni and I went there last week and were blown away by the many facets of extremity on display: No seating because it’s not extreme, 2-liters of Diet Rite because it’s not extreme to just drink a can of it, and most importantly stuffed deep-dish pizza with all the sauce on top because it’s not extreme to make it normal (but they also make it that way for all the pussies out there.) And perhaps most extreme of all, is the complete 180 I’ve done on Chicago-style deep-dish pizza thanks to Pizza Extreme and their extremely awesome ‘za.

So join me now, as I bandwagon the shit out of that viral sensation “General” Larry Platt with a Pizza Extreme version of his piece of shit song life’s work and bring my own born-again deep-dish lover gospel to the masses:

Sauce on the top,

Sauce on the top,

Lookin’ mighty good with your sauce on the top.

With the buttery crust,

Cheese, toppings under sauce,

Sauce hit the top,

Call yourself a pizza,

Lookin’ mighty good,

Walkin’ downtown with your sauce on the top.

The good: Besides the monster stuffed deep-dish, the menu is dipped out with an array of sandwiches like the Roman Emperor (not to be confused with the Roman soldier), sides like a whopping pound of fries for $3.75, and a five-pound bucket of wings for $27.95. If you don’t know how to party, these dudes will show you how.

The bad: The ambience rates a big fat zero since they basically want you to get yo shit and get out of there. I bet you if they had seen my daughter spit up on the floor, they would’ve told us to just leave it.

Try: Now that you have my song in your heart and a spring in your step, walk your ass down there and get a slice of stuffed deep-dish to go. I think that Pizza Extreme is the only place in the universe that you can get something like that.

Rating: Deserving of its own fake military ranking, like “Lieutenant” Pizza Extreme.

I used to have a long-running argument with an ex-friend about how, while pizza as we know it may have been “created” in America, it wasn’t inaccurate to call it Italian, because it was the Italian immigrants who made it here, not those dirty potato eating Irish. But he was stupid, so he said it didn’t matter that Italians in America made it, it was only American cuisine. Apparently his definition of what makes food of a certain culture is similar to how South American countries view territory disputes (look that shit up, I don’t have time to explain that metaphor here).

Why did I bring up a fight I had with a douche I don’t even talk to any more? Well, because Pizza di Roma, one of the less reputable pizza joints on Madison’s State Street, unlike about every other pizza place in Madison save Paisan’s, is 100% about referencing Italy. I mean, they’ve got Roma in the fucking name. Plus a prerequisite to working there seems to be that you have to be Italian (or at least Mexican) and have a love of hair oil and Italian soccer team t-shirts. Which probably makes Pizza di Roma the most authentic pizza joint in all of Madison. That is if you have a logical definition of what makes for “authentic” Italian pizza.

The Good: You can’t beat the size of Roma’s slices, since them shits are enormous. It’s like trying to eat half a frozen pizza at once. Plus their toppings are generally solid, with their sausage splitting the difference between Ian’s gastronomical annihilators and Rocky’s meatballs. They’ve also got a lot of side items (like cheese bread), which is a break from the norm of just slices at most downtown pizza joints.

The Bad: I know we are supposed to focus on the pizza here, but let me pull out my Doctor of Décor degree here for a moment; Pizza di Roma has easily the worst table-seating options of all time. They have those old plastic booths that used to be hot in Hardee’s, and you can’t move the table, which means lard-os like myself leave the place with a giant mark on our tummies from getting crushed by a booth for the duration of our meal. But then again, given that I’ve eaten at old pizza places in NYC, Pizza di Roma is more like a New York pizza place than any other non-NYC place I’ve ever been to (dingy, poorly-lit, shitty tables).

As far as the pizza goes, the cheese tends to be hit or miss, probably depending on how old the slice your sliding down your gullet is. I’ve had pieces with excellent cheese, but I’ve also had ones where the cheese tastes like that school lunch pizza cheese that is still causing childhood obesity and diarrhea across America. It probably depends on when you head to the place; the morning is good, the afternoon less so, and it’s better again at dinner.

Try: There are some more daring slice combos at Pizza di Roma (eggplant on a pizza? Fuck you), but mostly they are by the books with the kind of topping combos you can buy on a Jack’s at your supermarket. But Roma’s za is way better than that, obviously.

Rating: Four out of eight John Stamoses

Employee: Let me stuff your crust, Pizza Slut.

Pizza Slut: Ok!

Pretty rough, especially since I consider myself a bit of a pizza slut and I’m neither a woman nor a former Pizza Hut employee. It seems there are enough patrons of Ian’s Pizza in Madison that feel the same way, enough to warrant an Ian’s “Pizza Slut” t-shirt, anyways. And Ian’s has the kind of pizza that is definitely worth hoeing it up for.

With two locations inexplicably placed only blocks apart, Ian’s has set up a well-deserved pizza monopoly in downtown Madison by applying mega-fucked-up combinations of toppings to huge slices of ‘za. Even Travel Channel bald guy Andrew Zimmern took a break from his hectic animal balls-eating schedule to recently shoot a segment at Ian’s for his new show, coming specifically to pound a big gooey mac ‘n’ cheese slice.

Take your choice of either location, prepare yourself for some jazzy wall décor, and just try and not feel like a huge-ass slut for that pizza. But once you get it all up your guts, you can just forget about it.

The good: A luscious spread of huge WTF pizzas gone horribly RIGHT. Like Milwaukee Bucks center Dan Gadzuric, sometimes something that looks so shitty on paper turns out to be a complete game-changer in person. Lasagna, French fries, refried beans: they’re all here in pizza form. And it looks like (starting Nov. 23) they’ll have a Thanksgiving pizza with turkey, cranberries, stuffing, and gravy on top of mashed potatoes. I personally can’t wait to dip my pilgrim nuggets into that sauce.

The bad: If you go early there will probably be a bunch of little rascals wandering over from the children’s museum. If you go late there will probably be a bunch of larger rascals wandering over from The Pub. Either way, keep your eyes peeled for puke piles.

Try: Any and all of the pizza by the slice. But if you need dessert, try a blob of the artisan frozen yogurt. Artisan is like a different word for artist, so it will probably be like having a tiny Norman Rockwell jump into your mouth and paint a picture with yogurt.

Rating: It’s like if Ian Curtis and Ian MacKaye fucked and had a baby and the baby was born into Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf’s beard.

Pizza sits alone in an unfuckwithable food category. Like a can cozey that says “A bad day of golfing is still better than a good day at work,” most people agree that even shitty pizza is still pretty good. So what happens when you take the power of pizza creation into your own feeble hands in service of trying to gross out your bro? Pizza vs. Pizza, in which two esteemed constables of pizza mastication, Dr. Tenderoni and Dr. Benji Mane, your two Madison correspondents, challenge each other to eat totes gross slices of the other’s creation at Roman Candle.

In this, the first edition of Pizza vs. Pizza, the rules had yet to be set. So hopefully in the future some stricter guidelines will be in place. Because for a couple of dudes who thought they could handle just about anything pizza-related, these seriously fucked-up slices straight ripped our chodes off and made us watch as they threw them through a plate-glass window.

Tenderoni: When Dr. Mane approached me with his idea of making totes fucked-up slices for each other at the refined and art deco Roman Candle (a joint located on Williamson St. in Madison that lets you create your own slice) I jumped at the opportunity. I have long savored making weird ass food/drink combos for my friends to eat, since it’s like waterboarding without the whole subjugating a people thing. So for this first go-round, I figured I’d bust Dr. Mane’s cherry by getting buck-nutty on the topping selections for his slice.

For Dr. Mane, I chose the anus-annihilating combo of walnuts (to add texture), Chipotle peppers (to add heartburn) and spinach (to add giant biceps). I reasoned that since Dr. Mane is like two years from getting AARP, he’d start crying as soon as he got one of those peppers in his grill, talking about how he’d need a Werther’s to wash them down. Then he’d be like, “Walnuts? Frown Face.”

Benji Mane: I’ve eaten some classy pizzas in my day. Pine nuts? Goat cheese? Shittake mushrooms? Sounds like my bread and butter. In fact, I bet bread and butter are the only two things I haven’t had on a pizza. So I was super confidant that my fancified palate was perfectly honed to handle the gourmet topping selection at Roman Candle, as well as conjure up a slice that would change Tenderoni’s gastrointestinal tract forever.

Going in, I had an ace in the hole; beets. After that, who gives a fuck what the other two topping were? I could have added tits and unicorns, and the beets would still have ruined that slice. But why take chances? Add garlic for pungency and add corn as a painful reminder that no matter what you do to it, it will still come out the other end looking exactly the same.

Tenderoni: It didn’t really dawn on me until we were giggling our asses off reading the menu, wondering aloud if we could ask for human on a pizza, that not only would Dr. Mane be subjected to crazy azz shit I concocted, he’d be able unleash some hell-fury on my colon, too. And holy shit, my colon just packed up my rectum and moved in with its sister. First off: Corn is not that bad on a pizza. It’s got virtually no profile, taste-wise, and its texture is similar to green peppers when put on top of cheese. And the garlic? Not so bad either, even though the cloves were overpowering and caused me to breath garlic (literal particles) for some time after finishing.

But beets on a pizza that isn’t related to The Office? The worst. Of all time. The beets were diced into cubes roughly a quarter the size of a standard craps dice, and they were big and wet just like [metaphor redacted due to fear of my mother reading this]. The beets also stained the cheese a Miami Vice pink, which should never appear on a foodstuff, unless that foodstuff is Philip Michael Thomas’s shirted corpse. Add to the fact that I have never, ever actually eaten beets in my entire life, eating the slice was like adding a foreign species into my lower intestinal jungle. I immediately had to wash it down with four grape-flavored Tums, which just added insult to injury, reminding of the time I spent on the purple serpent of a beets-topped pizza.

Benji Mane: Somewhere in the world, a pepper grows so hot that it will ignite your very soul if you even think about ingesting it. Professional torturers rub this pepper on a man’s genitals and he begs to be shot in the face. Compare the heat to having a laser refracted through a diamond and then having it strike you directly in the brain. But considering my soft American diet, that pepper might as well be the pussy-ass Chipotle.

Never one to tolerate massive amounts of heat, getting a slice that made my cheeks flush just sitting on the plate made me nervous. On top of that, the mushiness of those little baked devil dicks was offset by the icky crunch of the walnuts that Tenderoni so callously selected. Spinach is pretty gross, but compared to the red-hot buttfest tag team of the peppers and walnuts, it tasted like cotton candy. My apologies go out to the dude sitting next to us while I play-by-played this horrible eating experience.

Winner: Draw Neither competitor was able to finish their entire slice.