I did not expect this to be the first pizzeria I would visit twice for Pizza Friday purposes; but when someone promises an extra-large pizza topped with nearly a full pound of cheese and ties it, no matter how tenuously, to the new X-Men movie, I cannot be expected to say no.
And so we have the XL X-treme Cheese Pizza. First, a few notes about the service. Unlike last time, I was forced to listen only to a brief audio advertisement before an actual human picked up to take my order. In keeping with their tradition of long waits, however, I was told that deivery of my pizza would take “about 45 minutes.” When I asked if it would be ready any more quickly if I picked it up, I was told I could have it in 15 minutes: I chose to pick it up.
Truth be told, the connection between my pizza and a major motion picture was actually unknown to me prior to my arrival at John’s place, where I came face-to-face with a giant brown box with the visages not only of Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman, but of completely out of place supporting actors Ryan Reynolds and will.i.am, among others. (Sidebar - Which is more scientifically fictional: will.i.am’s appearance in an X-Men movie or as a hologram on CNN? Bonus sidebar - In which situation is Ryan Reynolds more over his head: in an X-Men movie or as Scarlett Johansson’s husband?)
With the shock of the box behind me, I arrived home a good 30 minutes earlier than I was scheduled to receive my pizza delivery, and we dug right in. As advertised, the pizza is very cheesy but it does not, unlike many other extra cheese pizzas, taste like biting into a hunk of cheese. The ingredients’ general lack of flavor strength, one of Papa John’s signatures, worked to this pie’s advantage: not even one pound of cheese was strong enough to make the pizza overly cheesy. In fact, the sauce battled through in even the cheesiest of bites, not unlike a decent actor maintaining the integrity of a summer blockbuster. And like any decent summer blockbuster, this pizza was BIG. Well-played, Papa John.
