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Pizza Showdown: The Best Delivery Pizza
Coming from someone whose wife has worked for both Papa John's and Dominos...the Papa John's ingredients are almost universally better, except, interestingly enough, for the bacon. As for the religio-political issue, there's no way of knowing what percentage of your particular pizza order is going to end up in the hands of some group with whom you disagree. On the other hand, chances are that at least 15% of it will go to a minimum-wage driver who is trying to make enough to cover the heating bill this month.
Pizza Hut and the Walk of Shame
This is a subject that has puzzled me ever since the pizza giants started making inroads into the city. How do they survive..thrive, even, in a city that takes its pizza so seriously? Mostly for the same reasons they dominate the rest of America.
1) Delivery - It's the one thing the chains do very well. They will get you a consistent (if mediocre) pie in about half an hour more often than not. Their products are designed for delivery and hold up well in transit. That's why my parents back in Queens switched over to Papa John's and hardly ever order from local places anymore.
2) Good ol' fashioned marketing - TV, radio, newspapers, direct mail, coupon door hangers, etc. Free Superman DVD with pizza? The corner place can't do that.
3) Demographics - My brother's biggest complaint in life is that "New York isn't for New Yorkers anymore." The city is now full of tourists and yuppie midwestern college grads for whom chain pizza is a slice of home.
I'm reasonably sure that the classic NY slice is in no danger of becoming extinct, but I've seen enough Dominos and Pizza Hut boxes around town to know that times have changed.
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Ed, in your post you mention that Chinese food is like pizza in the sense that it morphed into something else when it crossed the ocean and has taken on its own American identity completely separate from its "authentic" roots. I smell another book! We need a "Pizza: A slice of heaven" for Chinese food. I would love to read a thoroughly researched book explaining how Chinese-American and Chinese-Canadian food came to be and discussing the regional differences in what we call "Chinese food" within the US itself.