Be Patient
Service workers make minimum wage to give you a premium service. Treat them like humans.
Philadelphia is no stranger to square or rectangular pizza. Many pizza places — you can find a pizzeria on every other corner in the city and maybe one every half-mile in the suburbs — have Sicilian pie, which is square with a thicker crust. Guy Fieri, when encountering a Sicilian pie, remarked that the owner of the establishment he was profiling on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives was making “focaccia bread,” the crust was so thick. Santucci’s makes a thinner-crust square pie with the sauce on top of the cheese. And then there’s tomato pie, which has the thick crust associated with the Sicilian but no mozzarella cheese on top, just a sprinkle of parmesan, and it’s served cold, to boot. None of these pies are quite like Detroit-style pizza.
The closest thing Philly has seen to widespread Detroit-style pizza has been Little Caesar’s. However, trying to pass that off as authentic and representative of the style is like passing Steak-umms off as a real Philly cheesesteak or, to move out of the Brotherly Love-Motor City Axis, like telling a native of Nashville that KFC has honest-to-God hot chicken on their menu. Detroit-style pizza is kinda like Sicilian-style, but the well-done edges give it a far deeper flavor profile. Additionally, Sicilian dough is just like Neapolitan/New York dough, just there’s a lot more if it. Like Santucci’s pizza, the sauce is on top of the cheese, but if you’ve ever ordered from Santucci’s, they just DUMP the sauce on top. That pizza swims in obscene amounts of sauce on a good day. Your mileage will vary; everyone in Northeast Philly has an opinion on Santucci’s, and few of them will line up completely. The Detroit-style pie is just a different beast.
New styles of food hitting an area can go either way. Your establishment can be a rousing success, or it can fall flat on its face. Icon Pizza, the hot new pizza joint with their assortment of the special kinds of pans you need to make Detroit-style pizza, hit the ground running with rave reviews and boffo sales, thanks largely in part to the Delco Restaurant Review page. As frequenters of said page, my wife and I have found a ton of great local spots to eat just in the few months we’ve used it. Icon Pizza shows up on that page A TON. All the pizzas had looked fantastic, so we decided to give them a shot.
My wife ordered our pizzas for Friday night’s dinner at 9:21 AM for a 5:45 PM pickup. Honestly, with the rep that the place had gotten in such a short time, we felt it a smart play. I showed up at around 5:40, and the line was out the goddamn door. The people in line were chattering about how Facebook blew them up, talking about how they put orders in at 3 PM to ensure they’d have pizza. Word of mouth, as I said above, an be an atomic bomb. I saw it firsthand.
As quarter-of-six turned into 6 PM, and that turned into 6:15, I started to get annoyed. It’s only natural, right? You have an order for a time, and the impatience starts to set in when it’s late. There are extenuating circumstances, sure, but logic never really completely sets in when you’re hungry and in a crowd of people with whom you think you’re competing for the next pizza to come out. However, one would have to be completely heartless to see an entire line of cooks and cashiers, all sweating, running around harried and rankled, sorting out pizzas, drizzling honey, ladling sauce on pies fresh from the oven, explaining to dejected callers that they were out of Detroit-style dough.
The truth settles in. You’re going to eat. It might be 45 minutes after you thought you were going to eat, but you were able to spend most of your day doing what you wanted to do. Well, I was, at least. These times for me in the here and now are strange and wonderful. But it’s not about me1, or at least my overall thrust in life. This for me is a minor inconvenience. The folks at Icon Pizza, or any busy restaurant, this kind of mayhem is their every single day, and that’s if they’re lucky enough to be busy.
When COVID broke, the happy horseshit refrain was that the essential workers were heroes. These platitudes were mostly empty from the people singing them the loudest, because as soon as things started to show an inkling of returning to normal, the phoniest of the group didn’t even deign to pretend to show anything but their true colors. Frontline medical staff get mostly lip service, but foodservice and grocery employees were dropped from that chorus, empty or otherwise, faster than a cowboy action figure from Andy’s hand in Woody’s intrusive thoughts in Toy Story 2. Even now, with the Delta variant giving rise to strains further in the Greek alphabet than anyone who isn’t a Biblical scholar or native Athenian might have ever gone, people give less heed to the needs of these severely underpaid workers.
Yet, if they’re even a nanosecond late, these people will bend over backwards. I got my pizza at 6:20 PM, and as I was leaving, one of the counter workers, a woman who was frantically checking pizza boxes, grabbing slips, directing traffic, told me to take a soda for my wait. This is considered a normal gesture, but why? It’s not like this place fucked our order up. They literally garnered a reputation of being so good at what they do that everyone in Delaware County ordered from their establishment on a Friday night. Even if they did fuck up, a free soda comes out of their bottom line, right? Imagine if every time you missed a deadline at work, or left a crucial detail out of a drawing, omitted a line item out of a customer’s order that you had to surrender something at 100 percent cost to you? And these pizza places are often staffed by workers who aren’t paid nearly enough working on the tightest of margins. Needless to say, I didn’t take the soda.
But you shouldn’t have to be offered soda to have your annoyances assuaged. You can say it depends on context all you want, but really, everyone has a bad day at work sometimes. Understanding that is understanding the skeleton key to a society everyone longs for, that they pretended existed on September 10, 2001 or September 12, 2001. It’s empathy. Empathy means understanding someone else having a bad day doesn’t mean you have to internalize it to make it all about you. It means being patient if your order is taking long to be finished because a trillion other people decided to call in and order the same damn thing.
And you know what? That pizza was well worth waiting for. The sauce was tangy and slightly sweet. It was splashed across the soft, pillowy cheese roof just right. The bed of Wisconsin brick cheddar and mozzarella atop soft, chewy crust was accentuated by the caramelized edges, browned just enough to provide a deep savory crust. The hot honey drizzled on top set off a firework-blast of flavor. But nothing beat the thick-sliced, unctuous, cup-shaped pepperoni. You haven’t lived until you’ve had pepperoni that curls up like its own little serving bowl filled with all that life-shortening grease that you would dab out with a napkin if it were any other slice of pizza. All of that glory made whatever annoyances I had before float away down a lazy river of flavor. But that’s what makes life so great. Annoyances are fleeting. Love is eternal. Remember that the next time you face what amounts to be a piddling inconvenience in your day.
If you follow me on Twitter, you know what I’m talking about.