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.