Anger Burger

Okay, so, pizza.

I’ve got this issue with pizza.  I love it.  And I love a very specific kind.  This comes up over and over again, so much so that I find myself having a questionable sense of déjà vu every time I talk about it – wait, did I talk about this before?  I’m pretty sure I did.

The easy version is that I love New York style pizza; Chicago is good, but not what I want when I want a slice.  That whole Sicilian/thick crust thing is the same: yum, bread with cheese.  But not so yum as pizza.  And then we come to Los Angeles, a city on which I’m certain Philip K. Dick modeled his scramble suit after.  It’s all people, all places, at all times.  The pizza is all pizza, from all regions, for all of history.  Sometimes within the same pie.

A while back I read that D’Amore’s of Los Angeles was a top contender, and indeed if one were to believe their own webpage, they are THE NATION’S #1 RATED PIZZA.  An unfortunate claim.  Now there’s nowhere to go but down.

Still, their new location on 3rd is nice and small, like a pizzeria should be, and the first thing that happened was owner Joe D’Amore getting up from his table and saying, “Welcome to D’Amore’s, I eat here, but I’m also the owner.”  It was so earnest and slightly rehearsed that we immediately altered our plan to get a test slice and instead ordered a whole pie.

We ordered a Quattro Colori, a pizza I must have badly misread because I was startled to discover both the presence of pork and mushrooms.  We like pork and Mike tolerates mushrooms, but for some reason I thought I was ordering a primarily basil and tomato pie.  No matter!  It smelled good, we were starving and short of a dirty kleenex, nothing on that pizza could have kept me from ripping out its throat and howling at the moon.

And hey, it was a tasty pie.  The price was still a bit rich for my blood ($20 fed Mike and I for lunch with no leftovers), but the ingredients were pretty impeccable and the service was tight.  The negatives are predictable: their small needs to be $5 cheaper and it seemed undersalted to me.  Luckily the pork was very, very salty and contributed to an overall pleasurable pie.  Without the pork I would have been shaking on the kosher.  The other negative was our fault: after 30 minutes in traffic, the pie suffered in texture.  Still, as good a pizza as I have had in this city.  The best in the nation?  Alas, non.

A week ago I was with my mom at Uwajimaya in Seattle when I spotted a package of Hurricane Popcorn.  Hey!  That looks familiar!  I’m simple-minded and gluttonous, so when I see things I’ve only seen on the internet I get a thrill not unlike meeting a celebrity.  And so, there I stood, hopping up and down and telling my mom, “I saw that on Tasty Island! I saw it!”  She was already putting a packet in her basket.

But holy shit!  $5 for a packet!  It had better actually blow roofs off, because that’s a lot of money for a bag of popcorn.

At first glance it seems like the “mochi crunch” or Japanese rice crackers are all that are in the bag, but the nori and flavorings are just hiding underneath.  But it helps to bring home that Hurricane Popcorn is easily reproducible in your own kitchen, provided you have nori and/or Japanese rice crackers.

Still, it’s nice that everything is included in one package, right down to a large plastic bag to shake the toppings and butter¹ onto the popcorn.

After all is said and done, well, we couldn’t stop eating it.  And the best part?  Popcorn is officially on my DON’T EAT list because the fiber aggravates my Crohn’s Disease too much.  And I still ate a fair portion of it.  Because, as already mentioned, I’m an irresponsible teenager. ²

¹ Not actually butter.  But my mom and I both believed it was real butter until we read the package, and mmm, oil and artificial flavorings – but it didn’t have that “butter popcorn” flavor at all. I’ll be damned, it tasted like the real thing.

² Not actually a teenager.