I love pizza. I don't just love pizza itself, I love the idea of pizza. It's unpretentious, something we all have in common, and yet it's infinitely customizable. It's universal and individualistic at the same time. Also, it's become enough a part of Western culture that elites can't dismiss it as worthless pablum of the great unwashed, the way they might for hamburgers. But in the other hand, pizza's individuality defuses the one-upmanship that usually poisons food discussion: You may encounter some self-righteous foodie who insists that the best pizza is from Guido's at 9th and Broadway, and anything less is inedible cardboard. But you can always say you prefer deep-dish pizza; the foodie will be infuriated, but you'll have diffused his power of culinary elitism over you.
What's interesting is, I'm just starting to see how many types of pizza there are, even if we restrict it to this continent. Lots of people have heard of Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, but I was intrigued to find that is not the only kind of pizza that's unique to an American region. Detroit (deep-dish, rectangular, crispy cheese), St. Louis (thin crust, local cheese) New Haven (thin crust, bitter cheese, no sauce), Colorado (lots of toppings, extra thick rim) and even Iowa/Illinois's Quad Cities (nutty-crust, spicy sauce) have their own styles.
I recently read that the Detroit style of pizza is actually related to the auto industry. It's rectangular because it's made on a kind of tray that was originally intended for holding spare parts in car factories. And because it's in a tray, rather than on a sheet, the toppings can go right to the edge, allowing the cheese to get crispy.
And that leads to the really mind-blowing part: in the last few years, the Little Caesar's chain has started selling a square deep-dish pizza with crispy-edge cheese. Well you might assume that was just something they made up, but no, it's based on Detroit-style pizza, since Little Caesar's is from Detroit. Those weird ads with the creepy seventies-style disembodied heads? They're actually introducing customers to authentic Americana.
This all leads back to my never-ending quest to get unique and slightly weird things for Canada in general, and Kitchener-Waterloo in particular. First off, could Canada get its own pizza? Yes, many restaurants and grocery stores have "Canadian" pizza, but that usually just means regular pizza with bacon. Further research reveals that Nova Scotia is way ahead of us on this: Halifax has Donair Pizza (donair meat and sauce on pizza crust) and Pictou County, on the north side of the province has its own unique style (with a "brown" sauce made with a variety of vegetables, and thick pepperoni.) These are now spreading slowly through the country with emigrating Nova Scotians, though mostly in places where there's a critical mass of expats to support a business (like in Toronto or Fort McMurray.) So one day these pizzas could be as common as poutine. It's facinating to see Canada create a culture, even if it is at a glacial pace. Come back in a few centuries and we might have our own identity.
And KW? I can't find any pizza that's particular to here, but we could do our usual thing of adopting German stuff. They have a pizza-like bread called Flammkuchen. I also searched for Mennonite pizza, but that doesn't seem to be a thing. Surely in a city with two universities, an influx of different cultures, and precocious downtown eateries looking to make a name for themselves, we can come up with something unique.
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