EATING OUT: Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s horrid

I was about 17 years old when I first tried pizza. This is because I grew up with a mother who was very mindful about what her children ate, and also because there were no pizzerias in the small town I grew up in.

When I finally went off to university and my diet was finally under my control, I fell in love with pizza at first bite and soon after, those extra pounds started to sit comfortably on my thighs.

Nowadays, I’ve become a little more discerning about how I like my pizza. Point is, if it’s going to make me fat, it might as well be the best damn pizza I’ve ever tasted. I’m so demanding you would think I grew up eating it!

Having sampled the dish at various eateries across the country, I’ve come to classify it into two: there’s the gourmet pizza you get at restaurants that take their craft seriously with some even having specialised wood-fired ovens, and then there’s the Kenyan pizza you get being peddled at the kind of eateries you would comfortably refer to as ‘joints’.

LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP

My go-to ‘joint’ seems to be Domino’s Gigiri, with whom I have a love-hate relationship.

They are like the ex-boyfriend I keep swearing never to go back to, except sometimes I get hungry and call because they are just down the road, and for my next two orders, things are great, and then they start messing up again, but I secretly still know I will never fully leave them without divine intervention.

I generally like veggie pizzas, but when it comes to Domino’s, there’s this little red devil on my shoulder that always sends me to the meatzza, which is laden with ham, beef, sausage and pepperoni.

Whenever they remember that I actually asked for a thin crust, it is always glorious. Sometimes I also get the extravaganza, which has beef, sausage, black olives, pepperoni, ham, mixed peppers and mushrooms, and because they always deliver it still hot to my doorstep, it is always delightful.

Like most pizza snobs, I don’t like pineapples on it and will therefore never order their chicken Bali or the Hawaiian, but I think we can all agree that mushroom instantly makes any pizza better.

Looking at the Domino’s menu, the chicken tikka might sound like a nice harmless little pizza but rest assured that it is an evil spicy piece of flatbread waiting to mercilessly annihilate your tongue.

They also have this beautiful little dish called a cheese bread. Sometimes I’ll get it as a side, but never when my mother is in town. It’s a perfectly salty and savoury bread filled with cheese and oven baked until it becomes all warm and gooey and perfect.

The thing about Domino’s, however, is that they are not consistent. If that is because sometimes they change the person that makes that cheese bread perfect, they should stop doing that.