August 2003

Crappy Pizza at Donato's in Lindenwold, NJ

It may appear that I am writing a few too many 'event reviews' lately, but I can't help myself. As a loudmouth, I have to tell someone about things that I've done. Besides, it's my damn website. I can do what I wanna. Think of this as tiny selection from my memoirs.

Anyhow, it was a Saturday. Bigfoot and I were in New Jersey visiting her parents. It was dinner time. Her mom took us out for a bite to eat. We picked Donato's Pizza. We made a bad choice.

The in-laws talked up Donato's because it is not your average pizza joint. Instead of having a server take your order and bring you your food, you call in the order from your booth-phone, and only then do you meet a server. There was and there wasn't service. Being a veteran of the service industry, I felt strange about going, but pizza is always a good dinner choice, right?

I ordered a personal pizza with green peppers. I didn't want anything too complicated, just tasty. I also ordered a Coke. While giving my order over the phone, I could hear the voice of the young woman taking my order, almost fifteen feet away. They have a novel, but stupid, idea.

Maybe the point, aside from the unnecessary novelty, is to eliminate the training (and turnover) of seasonal minimum-wage earning servers. That concept baffles me. I always thought pizza joint primary function, besides feeding people, was to create an atmosphere where older, male, managers make young, perky, high school girls cry (then his brother, playing good-cop, gets laid.) Maybe in South Jersey, water-ice stands employ all the unstable girls. Who knows? It could be that Donato's is making the best of a difficult situation. Of course, because their pizza is terrible, they actually make the situation worse.

All that time they spend on making a uniquely dumb dining experience must have rendered them incapable of cooking pizza well. Their pizza sucks. I can't say it any other way. (Well, maybe I can.) The sauce is flavorless, and the crust is just one oversized cracker. But the cheese? How can you explain making a pizza with provolone and NO mozzarella? What's the deal? Are they a bunch of retards?

Overall, I can't say that I enjoyed the experience at Donato's. I enjoyed the company, but I did not like the food. I did not like that place one bit.

Donato's can shove it.