The New Yorker – a reprise

This gentle reader is a tale of woe, a cautionary tale along the lines of one swallow not making a summer. As reported in an earlier post the best beloved, number one son and your humble scribe are great fans of Pizza Huts New Yorker pizza.

Thus on a balmy Saturday evening with more time on our hands than is good for one we decided that pizza was the meal of the day and for a change of scenery we would visit the scene of the crime, so to speak. We would eat in at Pizza Hut. We arrived, after a casual stroll, at the establishment with a modest bottle of Spanish red tucked under one wing and settled ourselves at a laminex table in the eat in section.

Memories from the past flooded back from my time in Melbourne and Johnny’s Green Room with its robust home cooked Italian fare and bare kitchen tables. Why it was called Johnny’s and Green was a mystery, it wasn’t green and I never met a member of staff who answered to Johnny. But the food was plentiful and the booze was cheap even if served under the table.

Our menus arrived and the first disappointment of the outing arose. There was no New Yorker on the eat in menu. Ah well the deep pan supreme looked pretty good and, yes they could add some olives. Disappointment number 2 followed in quick succession, they didn’t have any wine glasses. Ah well on picnics I have drunk wine from jam jars so water glasses would suffice.

It is a little known fact that you, dear reader, will now discover through the exploits of The Expat that 2 out 3 Pizza Hut waiters don’t know what a cork screw is. The knowledgeable third waiter was sorry to inform us that the restaurant didn’t have a cork screw. A pizzeria without a cork screw. Memories clattered to the floor and were crushed under the foot of the departing waiter. This was turning into a Pizza Hut story of the Australian kind.

When our pizza arrived the analogy was complete. The deep pan Supreme tasted like the soggy cardboard concoctions that the chain had been serving to Bruce and Sheila for years and had me avoiding them like the plague when living in Oz.

Ah well the New Yorker is still a damn fine pizza, will just have to get them to deliver. And I know there will be a cork screw, a couple actually. Perhaps I should lend them one, then perhaps not.