Delivered pizza should not be this good – particularly not from Domino’s

When you try something and are pleasantly surprised by its quality it can result in you examining your prejudices. The mind-buggering stupefaction of rancid-couch-potato sustenance-provider Domino’s actually delivering really quite nice pizza has been so intense that my certitude in the stability of fundamental concepts like black and white has been seriously shaken. How could they be so good?

On questioning my contacts who have more than a nodding acquaintance with the bottom-dwelling detritus of society it turns out this lurch toward quality was necessary to keep the Domino’s ship afloat. Mr Youtube relates the sorry tale of some rather unsavoury activities that some rather unsavoury Domino’s employees got up to with someone’s lunch. You’ve got to admire the astounding stupidity of this imbecilic pair as they then posted the video online. For the sake of completeness I include the video here:

With the ensuing media frenzy and generally diminished demand for snot-enhanced pizzas Domino’s made the radical step of re-inventing themselves as a purveyor of quality food. The menu was re-vamped, staff re-trained and kitchen processes sanitised with astonishing results.

The first suggestion we had that the reborn Domino’s were no longer so relentlessly down-market was their slick online presence. It provides a simple and transparent method of ordering your food without having to shout down the phone to a semi-coherent, zit-ridden teenager of dubious educational achievement. Once you’ve placed your order you can then follow its progress on the website as it gets assembled, cooked then subjected to an all-important quality control procedure before being sent out into the night to sate your hunger.

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We like our pizzas with thin crusts and Domino’s actually deliver properly thin, crispy bases rather than the atrocious limp and sponge-like abominations most delivery pizza vendors perpetrate. The edges of the bases have real hints of char on them – just like a real pizza!

The toppings consist of recognisable ingredients, not an amorphous morass of worryingly indistinguishable, drab lumps. They have distinct flavours as well, so are clearly fresh and have not been sitting in some luke-warm plastic tub with every other ingredient since the batch of stock was de-frosted. These are flavoursome, agreeable pizzas.

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Let me put this surprising experience in perspective. Domino’s still sell disquieting things like the ‘chicken kickers’ pictured right. I could not bring myself to touch them, they look like they are emitting alpha radiation. The pizzas themselves are not in spitting distance of the standards set by [link2post id=”41″]Santa Maria[/link2post], [link2post id=”351″]Franco Manca[/link2post] and [link2post id=”1264″]La Porchetta[/link2post]. However, in the delivery pizza idiom Domino’s are clearly the scented rose-bush growing in a pile of reeking manure. More than that, it is possible to sit down with one and have a pretty good pizza experience and a reasonably satisfying meal in the process. If kitchen shenanigans can lead to such sweeping qualitative rectification I am sorely tempted to get a job at Burger King and video myself praying for milk in place of using mayonnaise in some burgers.

Their website is here.

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