Papa John’s & the Incredible Shrinking Pizza!

I love pizza! If I were stranded on a deserted island and could only have one food, it would be pizza. Hands down. It would come with pepperoni and sausage (pork or Italian). And, of course, it would be thin, NY-style crust. No Chicago “pizza pie” for me. There’s more than one thing that I don’t like about Chicago, but I digress.

Ever since tasting my first Pizza Hut “Thin ‘N Crispy” as a young lad in central Florida, I have been hooked. It was even after sharing a “Meat-Lovers” Thin ‘N Crispy, following our first date to the Lake Placid Elementary School Fall Festival, that I knew that Brenda, my wife, would be the one!  From the standard fare served by national chains such as Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Papa John’s to the “homemade” pies I’ve consumed at countless mom and pop restaurants throughout the country, there haven’t been very many pizzas that I found inedible. Some have been average, such as the somewhat cardboard-like crust pizzas delivered by PTA (Pizza Transit Authority) to my dorm rooms and the Phi Sig house during my early undergraduate days at The George Washington University (prior to Domino’s arriving on the scene). Others, such as any pizza I have ever eaten in the City (i.e., NYC), have been delicious.

A few pizzas restaurants I have frequented may or may not have had the best tasting pizza (hard to remember that far back), but nevertheless hold a special place in my heart because of the memories that I have from eating there. One such place is the top of the 21st Amendment on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., on the edge of GWU’s campus back in the day (circa 1984-88). It was there that I was invited to join Phi Sigma Kappa (Lambda Chapter) in the fall of 1984. I can’t count the number of times that my fraternity brothers and I would hang out at the top of the 21A, eating pizza and shooting the breeze. I don’t believe that the 21A is still in business (at least at that location), but, it seems like yesterday (not almost 30 years ago) that I was chowing down on pizza with my brothers. Good times!

With all of my pizza-eating experience, I know a thing or two about good pizzas. As one who has ordered all sizes of pizzas, I also have a passing knowledge of what should constitute a good “large” pizza. So, when I ordered three “large” pizzas from Papa John’s on Tuesday night, I thought I knew the quality and quantity of the product I would be purchasing. As to the quality, Papa John’s delivered. As to the quantity, I think I may have figured out why they can use “better ingredients” for their “”better pizza.” It’s because they apparently don’t have to use as many ingredients on a “large, 14 inch” pizza when the pie turns out to be an inch short all the way around.

To paraphrase (very loosely) Justice Potter Stewart’s famous quip about “knowing pornography when he sees it,” I know what a large pizza looks like when I see it in the box. When the Papa John’s employee opened the box to show me my perfectly made, better pizza, what I saw was not a large pizza, but what might pass as a medium-sized pizza. Not believing my seeing eyes, I asked whether or not this was indeed a large pizza. The young man behind the counter assured me that it was. Because it had been more than a year since we had eaten a Papa John’s pizza, I asked when they “down-sized” the pizza. Somewhat flummoxed, he said it had been a while ago.

Although the box and the receipt on the side of the box said “14 Inches,” I knew that there was no way that this was a 14 inch pizza. Incredulous, as soon as I walked through the door of my house, I took out my tape measure and laid it out across the pizza.