Pizzodyssey #2

Point of origin: La Marinella
Topping: La Marinella (tomato, cheese, ham, pepperoni, mushroom, bacon, onion, fresh capscium, pineapple, olives)

Well, it's pizza time again! Mmm, smells good so far.

Hang on, what bastard decided it was a good idea to cut the crusts off? I'm not kidding - the crusts are cut off all the way around. It's been cut into a nice, neat grid, with a little throw-away border around the edge. Didn't anyone tell the cutter that eating your crusts makes your hair go curly? Or at least that it gives you a handle for the squishy bit of the pizza?

Indications so far aren't good, but it doesn't look awful, so let's take a bite, shall we? Oh, Christ. If Yoko Ono had been a pizza at the time she stole John Lennon away and killed The Beatles, she'd be this pizza. Come on, when you name a pizza after your restaurant, presumably it's the best you've got to offer, or it's your own uberpizza, right? The only person I can see liking this bastard is someone with no tastebuds. Or possibly no tongue. Or maybe a chick I used to to work with who once asked what sort of pizza we'd just had for lunch and then said, "Euww yuck! Kalamata olives! Prosciutto? What's that? Oh, yuck! Roasted capsicum! Yuck! I only like ham and pineapple!" (Really? We would never have guessed.) I think we should rename this pizza the La Yoko.

I really wish we'd thought to ask for it with no pineapple, too. Did someone add sugar? I didn't look at the menu closely and I'd forgotten how revolting pineapple can be on pizza. I used to love it, but now it just seems so wrong. Somehow it's not as bad if I'm making toasties on pitta bread or muffins, but it's just a horror on a proper pizza. Think of, say, marshmallows in beef bourgignon and you might be close. It's just Wrong (that's an Etiquette Grrls capitalisation, so please Insert Pained Look Here).

The only thing I can say for this pizza is that it's not burnt. Well, most of it isn't burnt. Bloke just held up a slightly blackened piece. The base is thin and there's about 2mm of crispness, but the rest is undercooked. The effect is something like chewing on plasticene. Bloke suggests it's akin to semi-cured silicon sealer, but since I keep away from silicon sealer, I can't really say. I suppose a fair metaphor would be partially-cooked pizza dough.

I think the worst thing about this pizza is that it has a weird red wine taste, as though someone decided to get all tricky with the tomato sauce base and add some left-over red wine. The overall effect is not dissimilar to that pizza at the end of the party onto which someone spilled stale goon.
As for the toppings, there are plenty of them, but

• ham, you say? are you sure it's not Spam?
• I can't actually see any bacon;
• the pepperoni (which the menu-writer was incapable of spelling - it has two Ps, old sport!) is only pepperoni if you're in a bizarre parallel universe where pepperoni has no pepper and Eddie McGuire isn't a wanker;
• the olives are those ugly pre-sliced, oxygen-treated, browny-black bastards that taste like nothing and have the texture of partially-tanned leather;
• the mushrooms are canned; and
• did I mention there's too much Ford-damned pineapple?

On the up-side, at least the capsicum is red. (Because remember, green cap is crap!) It's in pieces roughly the size of a fingernail paring, but it's red. Tomato sauce base - meh. Cheese - tasteless, barely identifiable as a dairy product. Overall, this was an arse pizza. It was edible, but certainly not enjoyable.

Verdict: * Yes, a single, solitary, lonely little star. I would have gone lower, but I presume that, over-sweet and red-wine-ish as it is, it couldn't be worse than Pizza Hutt, Pizza Haven or, Ford forbid, Domino's. I have to keep something in the tank to heap rubbish on pizzas of the generic and/or frozen variety, you understand. One may be the loneliest number, but it is as low as I dare go just two pizzas into the Pizzodyssey.