Don't F*ck With Italian Pizza: Domino's Pulls out of Italy
No one is crying about this. NO ONE.
When I read this morning that Domino’s was about to close their stores, I cheered. I literally cheered.
And this was before coffee.
I’d seen their storefronts in various places in Rome, always with a shudder of revulsion. Domino’s and all it represents (cheap unhealthy food, soulless American franchise, sloppy assembly-line production, underpaid labor) was the very thing I strove to get away from when I moved from the U.S. to Italy.
I hate fast food. I hated it when I was stateside. I hate it here. And I especially hate it when an American corporation tries to foist bad pizza on the land of pizza, which is Italy, a country that bleeds tomato sauce.
American corporations are, of course, equal parts skulduggery and hubris. It’s how they survive. First, the skulduggery: inventing creative ways to avoid taxes, oversight, and culpability. Second, the hubris: thinking for one single minute that any American corporation should bring pizza to the country that invented pizza (don’t even think about @ me with that “Pizza was invented in China” rot, which is the same thing as insisting Benjamin Franklin invented electricity because he flew a key on a kite.)
850 Domino’s pizza stores they were planning to open here in Italy. 850, with their rancid BBQ pizza, stuffed crust pizza, and pizza with pineapple. Who did they think they were dealing with? Italians eat the real deal, and trust me, it doesn’t have chopped pineapple on it.
Here are some key differences between American and Italian pizza.
Italian crust: a thin crispy crust, usually savory.
American crust: a greasy doughy mess often stuffed with more grease, then served in a popup cardboard box.
Italian sauce: a savory and aromatic puree, redolent of garlic, oregano, olive oil and fresh tomatoes. You could eat it by itself. Seriously. It’s that good.
American sauce: tangy and overly sweet, but probably because the tomatoes came out of a tin can and were then doused with sugar. Very thin-bodied. Nothing tastes fresh.
Italian toppings: either one topping at time or a second topping lightly distributed, such as mushrooms, ham, salami, peppers, with fresh basil leaves as a garnish.
American toppings: as many as possible, preferably barbecue pork, barbecue chicken, cheeseburgers, mountains of processed cheese, bacon, sausage, tuna, an egg, broccoli, avocado, carrots, an old shoe, and in some instances, fudge.
Italian Cooking Methods: pizza oven or wood-burning pizza stove.
American Cooking Methods: pizza oven or microwave.
But my grudge against Domino’s goes deeper than their shambolic, Bowdlerized version of pizza. They do violence against Italian culture, yes, but they also do violence to local economies, and for one simple reason:
American corporations can afford to pay higher rent. Italian business owners can’t.
If Domino’s gains a foothold in a Milanese neighborhood, say, and pays $15,000 a month in rent, how many Italian mom-and-pop shops can do the same? None. Rents will rise everywhere. And that means no more family-owned businesses serving fresh delicious pizza, and a lot more soul-crushing American franchises churning out approximations of same.
The same thing happens in when Trader Joe’s or Starbuck’s opens a store in disadvantaged American neighborhoods. Pretty soon, no one can afford to live there.
Domino’s had big plans here. They were going to drive all the mom-and-pops out of business due to their “superior business model.” They were going to deliver pizzas to people’s homes, gin up huge profits, and dominate the market.
Except they didn’t.
And that’s because Covid happened.
Suddenly, all the pizza restaurants had to start delivering or risk going out of business. Domino’s hopes for market saturation were dashed by an ugly reality: their pizza was gross, no one wanted it, they never should have come here, and boy were they stupid to think they could out-pizza the pizza makers.
If you’re sensing an unusual amount of vitriol and animosity here, you aren’t wrong. I like my Italy exactly the way it is: Italian. There’s enough pizza here, thank you. I’d also like to offer similar regards to Starbuck’s, who had the gall to open a store in Rome, but that will have to wait until another Cappuccino.
Domino’s had incurred over 10.6 million euros (roughly 10.8 million dollars) of debt by the end of 2020. What it’s up to now is anybody’s guess. The company was granted protection against creditors for 90 days, but that’s expired. Any minute now, I expect investors will come storming into boarded-up stores with their torches and pitchforks, howling for blood. Or possibly making off with a sink or a set of steak knives—you know, stuff you can easily off-load on eBay—to recoup their losses.
Let this be a lesson to other American corporations who have the arrogance to think they can march into Italy and throw their weight around. My advice? Stay in your lane. This capitalist model of endless and rapacious economic growth doesn’t work anymore anyway, especially in a country like this one.
Domino’s, I invite you to take your awful, sickening pizza and go home.
Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
We’re talking pizza here, so I’d love for you to share your opinion. The comments section is below.
Oh...and the next person to hand me a slice of Hawaiian "pizza" will pull back a bloody stump.
Pull out? That doesn't sound manly to me.... :-)
American fast-food pizza is the fucking worst. It's an assault on the taste buds and sensibilities of anyone with any standards and a sense of their place in the world. Domino's taste like the sort of roadkill you'd find in a Robert Earl Keen song, and Pizza Slut isn't far behind.
Portland was recently named the Best Pizza City (outside New York, of course), probably because there are people here who actually take the art of making pizza seriously. Of course, "best" is highly subjective, but if you know where to look, you can find some pretty decent Neapolitan pizza. I'm guessing, because, never having been to Naples, I have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
As I'm writing this, I'm sipping on a Starbucks iced Oat Milk Latte, and I'm realizing just how corporate good food and coffee has become. Just when something becomes worthwhile and very, very good, along comes corporate America to strip it for parts, milk it for whatever dollars are there to be made, and totally fuck it up. I'll bet Starbucks coffee was pretty good when it was one location at Pike Place in Seattle. Now it takes like the burnt ashes of Uncle Eddie from Malibu, CA, to Bluefield, WV.
American corporations don't know when to leave good enough alone, and they certainly don't understand that going into a country, destroying the business culture, and imposing Americanism on people is a lousy way to do business. You don't save a patient by sucking the blood out of their body. Italy's done just fine for many hundreds of years without Domino's; how arrogant of them to think that they have anything at all to offer the birthplace of pizza.
I love Vincenzo!!