Hell Pizza -
Ok, this is probably going to be one of my shorter posts. After eating the pizza from Hell Pizza in North Van, I have barely a thought or opinion about it. My mind is empty…completely blank…
I guess I can tell you why I decided to pay Hell Pizza a visit today. Contrary so what some may think, I did not choose to visit Hell Pizza because of its name. The words “hell pizza” did not evoke any particularly strong imagery in my mind. I think the work “hell” is overused when it comes to food. Whenever a dish is even remotely spicy, the word “hell” is inevitably introduced into its name.
But I think the name “Hell Pizza” has more to do with the theme of the underworld and its inhabitants than spicy food. This theme is clearly evident when I walked into the restaurant.
The names of their pizzas were also underworld-themed. My wife ordered the snack-sized (personal-sized) “Wrath” pizza.
The wrath pizza came with pepperoni, tomatoes, green peppers, onions. There were several optional items, all but one of which my wife declined. The optional item that she did not decline was the chili peppers. They had four levels of spiciness for the chili peppers and my wife chose the third level, the ring of fire.
After her first bite of the pizza, my wife said that the pizza was really spicy. But then she had a second bite, and it was not as spicy. She said that the first bite was really spicy because she just happened to bite into a lot of the chili peppers. That, combined with the fact that the pizza was still pipping hot, accentuated the ‘heat’ of the pizza. Once the pizza cooled down, my wife said that even the bites with a lot of chili peppers did not feel that spicy.
Other than the spiciness, my wife said that she did not detect a lot of other flavours. She said most of the ingredients tasted like nothing, and that the cheese also had a rather boring flavour. She also thought that the crust was very forgettable. She did not like the pizza as a whole. She added that it was pretty hard for her not to like anything that was spicy, but the wrath pizza was one of those rare, spicy food items that she disliked.
I had the snack-sized “Lust” pizza.
I guess having too much lust is not a good thing, because the ‘lust’ pizza seems to be their featured (and therefore most “damned”) item. It was the first item on their menu, and it had a box around it on the menu board with two little “hellish” illustrations on the side.
The pizza came with pepperoni, salami, ham, bacon, spicy capicolli, and a choice of sweet chili, smoky BBQ, or tomato sauce. I went with the sweet chili as the base sauce for my pizza.
The sweet chili sauce tasted exactly like its name. It was sweet and it was spicy. The two flavours also became the two most dominant flavours of the pizza. The only other flavour that I detected from the pizza was that of the ham. I tasted nothing else. It was like the other pieces of meat all went M.I.A. The cheese was also bland-as-hell. The crust had such a boring and generic texture that I couldn’t even tell you what it felt like when I bit into and chewed through it.
The whole pizza felt very much like a supermarket store-brand frozen pizza that tried its best to be anonymous. I had a hard time trying to recall memories of what the pizza tasted like, and I just finished eating the pizza less than two hours ago!
I guess the two words that come to mind when I think about the pizza are bland and boring. It was so bland and boring that I don’t have much to say about it.
My daughter had the snack-sized “333″ pizza.
The “333″ is half of the “666″ pizza, but halving most sinister number in Western culture probably reduced all of its “sinister-ness”. I totally didn’t know what “333″ meant when I ordered the pizza for my daughter. I only found out about its being half of the “666″ piza after going over their menu for the third time while waiting for the pizzas.
The “333″ pizza was basically a cheese pizza with any one topping of choice. My daughter chose pepperoni as her one topping. She said that this pizza tasted worse the the pepperoni pizza she usually had at school. She further commented it was even worse than the pepperoni pizza at chuck-e-cheese’s. She said that this pizza was similar to the pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut in Taiwan, which barely even resembled a real pepperoni pizza. My daughter’s reaction was the polar opposite of my reaction. Whereas I did not have much of an opinion about my rather bland and boring pizza, my daughter – who usually thinks that all pizzas taste the same – had a strong negative opinion about her pizza.
…I think you’re probably still waiting for me to give you the reason why I visited Hell Pizza today. As I said in the second paragraph, I did not visit the Hell Pizza because of its underworld theme. No, I visited the pizzeria because it was a chain originating from New Zealand and I was curious about what Kiwi (New Zealandian??) pizza tasted like. I figured that there would at least be a slight regional variation that would set it apart from North American, Greek, Italian, or any other type of region-specific pizza. I guess I was wrong. The pizza I was served at Hell Pizza today could have stood in for any version of generic North American pizza served at any generic North American restaurant. It was generic enough that it could even stand in for the most generic of frozen pizzas…it wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the worst pizza that I’ve had, but it was probably one of the most boring-tasting pizzas that I’ve ever had.
Also, Hell pizza from down under? Hell = down under = New Zealand???
