Pizza, Pizza

Have you been to Little Caesar’s lately?

Don’t you dare turn your nose up at the thought of an affordable full-sized hassle-free pizza. Not all of us live in apartments with money trees fully in bloom out back. It’s time we college students gave the Hot-n-Ready the respect it deserves — because Little Caesar’s was made for us.

Look, I get it. Papa John has Peyton Manning in his corner. Firehouse pizza is pretty dang good around tax return season when you’ve got wads of cash eating a hole in your pocket. Even Domino’s provides a nice healthy alternative since that nauseating fake garlic-buttered crust of theirs usually forces you to give up halfway through your second slice and pour yourself a bowl of Marshmallow Mateys instead.

Is Little Caesar’s the absolute best wedge of tomato-glazed doughy goodness to ever grace my tastebuds? I won’t say that — but I won’t not say that either. Little Caesar’s is the essence of comfort food. It’s safe. It pleases your low expectations with unexpected freshness.

It costs five bucks.

Looking to save some money by limiting how much you eat out? The answer is Little Caesar’s pizza. Oh, you already set some money aside so now you can take your lady out on a fancy date? Find out if you’ve got yourself a keeper — take her to Little Caesar’s pizza. I mean, don’t just stay there, take a Hot-n-Ready to a nice park or something. It’s fall and the weather is finally freaking beautiful. Go define your relationship under a maple tree, over some Little Caesar’s pizza. Show her you can be both fun and frugal. Pizza is pizza.

The knock on Little Caesar’s seems to be this false notion that pizzas just sit in those oversized space heaters for days on end like tepid concession stand hot dogs at a high school football game. Wake up, non-believers — this is a college town. You will never taste a Hot-n-Ready more than 20 minutes removed from its glorious inception. Twenty minutes shouldn’t be a big deal, since that’s about as long as it takes to wait for a pie from any other establishment to cool down enough to not annihilate every nerve ending in the roof of your mouth.

I’m pretty sure that’s actually in the Pizza Hut business model — just bake pizzas so blisteringly hot that folks think the taste of blood and seared flesh is from their permanently damaged gums, and not from the grease-soaked cardboard they just dropped three minimum wage work-hours on.

Stop overthinking this. A pizza should not boil your soft tissue on contact, just as it shouldn’t be an apathetic room-temperature patty of congealed ingredients tasting of crappy cheese and disappointment.

Pizza only needs to be two things, and I know you know where I’m going with this. It should be hot. It should also be ready. It should be big enough to share with a friend but not quite so big that you can’t take one on by yourself after spending an entire exhausting day on campus. There’s only one place you can get that, and it’s Little Caesar’s.

I’ve personally witnessed the North Logan location crank out custom orders minutes before closing without complaint. The staff knows why you’re there, and they don’t judge you for it — they know sometimes in life you need them. They’re there for you, for me, and for that tool who ordered eight custom pizzas at 9:55 pm. They didn’t complain once, either. They just did their jobs past the closing bell because they knew without the reliability of Little Caesar’s, this growing community of ours loses a little bit of its charm.

So quit staring down your nose at it — Little Caesar’s is literally one of the reasons America is already great.