While the pile of crust grows skyward

Molina Pizza (R-House, 301 W. 29th St., Baltimore MD)


The proposition that anything good will ever come of humanity is increasingly in doubt as far as Pizza Club can see. At a distant point in the past people constructed systems of morals, perhaps only as elaborate edifices for power and domination, and history is a long catastrophe in which we constantly fail to uphold these loophole-riddled doctrines except when they serve to oppress the weak and extort wealth. Speaking of elaborate edifices for power and domination, a few months ago (maybe up to a year ago, time is meaningless) Pizza Club visited the R-House in Remington.

The R-House is a carefully-curated reimagining of a mall foodcourt, set in a reclaimed auto body shop. In the late twentieth century, teenagers needed cars to get to the mall. The mall was a place where many people in the coveted Millennial demographic first experienced a consumerist simulacrum of an urban town square. The town square was a gathering-place where one engaged in shared discourse with friends and strangers under terms of mutual respect as part of a pluralistic social fabric. It’s also where deviants were executed by hanging, and witches burned at the stake.

We were prepared for the pizza at R-House to be very good. We understand that everything about the R-House is wholesome and responsibly-sourced, returning millennials to a comforting and functional dining format without denting their self-image as food connoisseurs.
 
Pizza Club worries a lot about nostalgia: is it a toxic feeling that keeps us from recognizing the truths of the past and the urgency of action in the present? It can keep us in thrall to a myth of the familiar, familiar as in familial, family, the magic circle of capitalist atomization dividing 'us' from 'them'. It's an interesting time for nostalgia, as city-dwelling Millennials begin having babies and moving (back) to the suburbs. Development projects targeted at this demographic are actively erasing the urban-suburban distinction by creating suburban shopping centers in the city and dense pseudo-urban tracts in the suburbs. This smooths over many aspects of city life that might be unattractive to former suburbanites used to a certain level of homogeneity and convenience, while lessening the friction of ultimately returning to a suburb – both settings offer basically identical condo-plus-retail-and-parking-garage complexes, a smog of familiarity that spreads across the landscape.

Pizza Club appreciates that a gathering space such as R-House is genuinely useful, flexible, and welcoming for many. Though its spirit animal is the “indebted freelance millennial coffee connoisseur on a bicycle who craves community and authenticity,” people from all over the city will use this space for their own purposes of hanging out, and that is great. It has an awesome area for kids to run free and play with giant padded blocks. It makes your life easier and probably helps the environment because you can stay in one place instead of driving around to various scattered small businesses. In 1952, real estate developer James Rouse had a similar idea for how to modernize urban consumption. It was called the Mondawmin Mall. In 1763, the city of Baltimore had a similar idea for gathering farmers and merchants together for better consumer access. They built public markets. Interestingly, these precursors sold things that you took home with you, in the case of public markets, providing fresh produce to most city residents; the millennial food hall sells a transient experience of food.

When it first opened, R-House suffered from a significant food-court oversight: amid expensive coffee, fried chicken, and ice cream, there was no expensive pizza. The Seawall Development Company and Urban Pastoral Collective, a “next generation, boutique Development Firm” that seems to curate the various R-House vendors, set out to fill the void this past summer by creating Molina.

Here we come to a sore point in the pizza discourse which R-House unintentionally jabbed with their release of a highly-produced promotional video offering a fictionalized backstory for Molina. The video features wind blowing through fields of wheat and basil in the Old Country as a lovely young woman tells her family’s story of living off the land and baking bread according to the Old Ways. Then American soldiers arrived for the Great War and the cheerful Italians served them irresistible focaccia. Our protagonist fell in love with a GI and came to the New World bearing the gift of pizza. Pizza Club is not questioning anyone’s personal family history, nor do we have any interest in policing the historical narrative about the origins of pizza in the United States. However, as an objective gloss of the Pizza Club community’s audience response, I will say that many found this video confusing.

A sophisticated consulting firm created a pizza counter to go in the food court they designed. That’s fine and makes perfect sense. Why play the authenticity game in this postmodern moment when everything is a hologram of a pastiche conjured out of the amnesiac miasma of the internet? Perhaps the name of the consulting firm, “Urban Pastoral”, suggests an answer – the backward-looking pastoral genre, melded with the millennial love of the urban and sustainability, has conjured this disjointed gesture of nostalgia for a distant past that screens a more immediate nostalgia for our own childhood malls, advertisements for Prego pasta sauce, and belonging, if only for an hour, to the Italian-immigrant family at Olive Garden, which always seemed a lot friendlier than my actual Italian immigrant family.

We must set this unfortunate video aside. We regret ever watching it and will now put it out of our minds.Think about the first vs. the second belltower scene in Vertigo. Think about anything else.

Given the high standards of the R-House, Pizza Club was ready to take its shrill Marxist critique/bitter class resentment and wad that critique/resentment into a tiny ball and cram that ball into an $8 waffle cone of premium Old Bay-flavored icecream and then shove that icecream into a planter full of succulents and walk away from it. We cleansed our souls of anger and opened our hearts to gracefully accept that food from food halls tastes good.

We’d already played out the script in our heads: people are correct to Uber here from Canton and wait in a 40-minute line for pizza because these rugged young men in flannel shirts are doing a brilliant job crafting a high-quality product that stands alongside other distinguished Baltimore pizza offerings while adding something new and intriguing to the mix.

Cheese pizza

However, this was not the case. Many Pizza Club members described their Molina experience as “uncanny” – as Ben put it, “too close to real, but not quite.” What we ate “didn’t read as pizza,” said Mark. The ingredients “don’t marry, it feels disconnected.” Small bits of toppings are lost on a vast, dry crust, which is rather like an under-dressed flatbread (about six years ago, in a smokey backroom, flatbreads were quietly re-named “Neapolitan pizza”?). The crust was leavened and cooked correctly, fluffy on top and crunchy on the bottom, Todd observed, but “the taste… I don’t know. It’s like pizza.” Conversely, Mark noted, “It’s not like pizza. This is so strange.”

“It feels very anonymous,” Stacie remarked. We got a couple of dry, plain-ish cheese pies, and one with numerous toppings, including superficial traces of pesto, red onions, and cauliflower, that Ben described as “dazzle camouflage on a battleship.” 

Dazzle camouflage pizza

The logistics of Molina had yet to be worked out at that early point. Most of our pies were cold because no one had called out our order while we sat ten feet away for half an hour. An attempt to sample their pizza more recently ended in failure because it was “half-price night”. We stood in a line, but the stall did not appear to be taking orders because they were frantically filling previous orders from people who reported that they’d been waiting for forty minutes. This level of demand suggests that Molina will have no problem selling pizza within a crowded food court, but may need to staff up if they intend to offer deals. In a final, cheap-ass attempt at critical objectivity, Pizza Club mooched half a slice off a friend a few weeks ago. Because Pizza Club was hungry and drunk, we did not obtain usable results from this sample. Therefore, we acknowledge that Molina may have made significant advances in its pizza-craft that we are unaware of.

In addition to the origin story recounted in their promotional video, Molina also claims the distinction of making the only “New Haven style” pizza in town. The layering of Old and New World identities is certainly something that Pizza Club can get behind, but we just want to know why. Is anyone from New Haven? Is that where the lady in the video began her new life in America? Members of Pizza Club familiar with the New Haven style describe it as charred and chewy, often including clams, but did not see a strong kinship with the pizza at Molina.

Molina promised to add to Baltimore’s pizza scene with a by-the-slice option, which is certainly lacking in the premium pizza market. Ben noted that “a slice of this pizza is the single cheapest food entree you can get at R-House.” This makes it an adaptive choice if you’ve been pressured to meet friends there, need food, but for whatever reason do not want to purchase a $14 sandwich. However, this type of pizza is ephemeral in nature; there’s a reason that Neapolitan places only serve pies fresh out of the oven. It doesn’t lend itself to re-heating, as the crust becomes brittle and the interior sponges up what little moisture was sitting on top. The New York slice, with its viscous cheese blanket, is infinitely more forgiving.

They have, as promised, obtained fine ingredients, including “legit” prosciutto, nice cheese, and fresh herbs. For sauce, they utilize what Ben terms “that weird spare acidic tomato situation,” associated with the idea of “freshness” but adding little flavor. These ingredients are used very sparingly, such that a basic cheese pie with basil featured two basil leaves, four dollops of cheese, and a lot of crust that nobody ate. Every pie had a lot of crust that nobody ate. We were buried in the accumulated crusts of half-remembered pseudo-histories.

Crusts of forgotten ancestors

Why do we care about pizza at this point? Would it be better not to perceive that anything is wrong, to accept the machinations of capitalism that determine our lives and choices and just feel good that we can technically pay for an $18 pizza which leaves us hungry? Why is it ok that the pleasure of spending money irresponsibly is the only pleasure that our society condones? Why are we blanketing the landscape with pastoralized monuments to a memory of the mall food court? Molina’s pizza tastes like the failure of nostalgia, the impossibility of returning to something “better” that wasn’t very good or that someone else imagined for us. We’re stranded in the present, there is no going back.

The almighty purse

This is just a story about a place filled with items which some people can buy and other people can’t, which some people enjoy and others do not enjoy. Obviously any commercial site could have a similar story. In the case of Molina, the material substrate of their pizza is really not worth putting into your body if you have alternatives. If you’ve already committed to spending time at R-House and you need a flat food made of bread, Molina’s pizza won’t hurt you. It may cause you to feel full yet hollow. Children in the play area may be stacking pizza crusts into fortresses, knocking over the fortresses, and building them again. You may briefly feel dizzy as the pile of debris before you grows skyward.
5.5/8 slices

In the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility

Pizza Studio
3201 St. Paul Street
Charles Village

Pizza Studio's product is definitely pizza because Pizza Club “immediately recognized it" as such. We accept the evidence of our senses. But what subliminal machinations underpin this moment of recognition?  Even taste, smell, and cheese are constituted by a field of structural forces. The present is opaque to itself – “each 'now' is the now of a particular recognizability.” The people of Baltimore recently entered the now of infinitely-customizable premium-quality pizza served in under two minutes.

What's more, this pizza asserts its status as a work of art created by you, the consumer. Where the gates of Dante's Hell bear the inscription, “Abandon All Hope,” the gates of fast-casual dining entreat you to “Create Your Masterpiece."

Pizza Studio is a franchise “fast-casual” restaurant from California recently slotted in to the gleaming brick-and-glass arcades of the 3200 block of St. Paul, a block notable for looking and feeling nothing like Baltimore. Undergraduates can be observed through the plate-glass windows of Chipotle, Cold Stone Creamery, and Starbucks, enjoying the remarkable continuity of consumer experience made possible by the extensive geographical coverage of these brands. By substituting “a plurality of copies” for the unique existence of a particular place, they constitute a distributed zone of the familiar that empowers college students, families, tourists, etc. to move uninhibited through an 'urban' environment that would otherwise offer them few recognizable enjoyments.

There are already two pizza places in the Hopkins zone that should meet the needs of undergraduates, but they definitely haven't captured the current market. They don't belong to the particular recognizability of the now: freshness, 'local'-ness, hip design and branding, and the embrace of myriad dietary restrictions. They lack a story, ethos, values, or globally-oriented social commitments. Pizza Studio won't compete with any of the neighborhood pizza places – it's in the ring with Chipotle in a battle for which eight-dollar lunch-food spectacle can assuage the creeping bad consciousness of late capitalism.

Pizza Studio frees you from all limits and constraints as you queue up to order your custom pie. If you find yourself experiencing limitations, it's due to your own weak imagination and ultimately, your failure as an artist -- in which case you can select a pre-fab “Masterpiece” from a menu.

The fresh, all-natural components of a Pizza Studio pie flow rapidly through different stages of matter. As in the studio of a highly-successful contemporary artist, the transformation of raw material into art is carried out by assistants whose labor is not “creative,” and thus, effectively invisible. Since you, the consumer, are also the artist, you pay for the cost of materials, facilities, and cheery technicians to realize your vision under your supervisory gaze.

Also like a highly-successful contemporary artist, you the patron of Pizza Studio are plugging in to the front end of a cultural production apparatus with its back end in military R&D, management psychology, despoliation of the earth, and an endless chain of exploitative labor practices. Delicious all-natural ingredients and seamless customer service did not invent themselves. The employee motto of Pizza Studio is “SNAP” – “Sense of urgency, No excuses, Attention to detail, Pride of ownership.” This motto is inscribed in the frantic, slightly-unhinged slicing pattern of a Pizza Studio pie.

Samit Varma, one of the founders of Pizza Studio, spent eight years as a Navy officer on nuclear submarines before he got his MBA. His partner is a career corporate ladder-climber of successful food franchises like TGI Friday's. The duo billed themselves as “former Baltimore residents” for the opening of the Charles Village Pizza Studio, which means that one grew up in Rockville and the other lived in Owings Mills. Behold the mercenary reproducibility of the 'local' – witness the militarization of the artisanal – in a weapons-grade toaster oven that blasts your personal-sized pizza with 50-mph gusts of scorching wind generated by the beating of Satan's wings in the innermost circle of Hell.

 All of this is yours for seven dollars and change – another attraction in the college market which prizes the illusion of quantity. The actual quantity of food material on your pizza will not increase appreciably even if you select every topping. Pizza Studio is not stupid – economies of scale and scientific optimization underpin each casually-strewn handful of nitrate-free pepperoni. Consumer psychology revolves around a primal delusion of rational decision-making, the appearance of “deals” that give maximum value for money. Whenever you experience this instinct, rest assured, someone with a six-figure salary is laughing and snorting coke off a Pizza Studio to-go box emblazoned with the catchphrase “Your Hot Masterpiece”. 

 Since it is an important function of capitalism to deny us knowledge of our time and place – to produce a fully-realized phantasmagoria that masks the obvious material conditions of life – the presence of Pizza Studio on a Johns-Hopkins-owned block of Charles Village, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. explains itself. “It's gonna suck when this creative artist space gets driven out by gentrification and Hopkins development,” one Pizza Club member observed.

Pizza Club quickly located the “Starving Artists' Wall,” really half a wall, in the back corner of Pizza Studio. The concept is to have local artists – presumed to be starving because we all know the difference between creativity-branded commodity capitalism and creativity the disease that makes you actually go to art school – hang their work in the restaurant and sell it to customers. This is great synergy because the theme of Pizza Studio is the mind-warping lie of the creative economy. Dwarfing the local art are numerous restaurant industry stock photo canvas prints with pictures of weathered, brown-skinned hands holding vegetables.

I ordered the requisite plain cheese pizza. I felt like a failure because I hadn't expressed myself using the infinity of options available to define my unique pizza identity. However, when the Pizza Club Power Lunch Team took a synchronized bite of our cheese slices, we all experienced the mysterious confluence of sensory cues telling us that this was, indeed, Pizza – a good-tasting cheesy bread object fresh out of a heating device. “I thought the crust was gonna be bullshit,” said one PC'er, “but it's not terrible crust.” We ate a wide variety of pies from the menu and from our own rich imaginations, all of which tasted like pretty good food.

The Pizza Studio banks on a psychic economy of additive flavor, where “flavor” feeds back into the creative expressiveness and perceived value of their product – what we might call a flavor-creativity-value complex. The crust has “no particular flavor” or texture. The unlimited toppings, which Pizza Studio fully expects you to pile on, are the building-blocks of flavor-creativity-value. Then there are “glazes,” bottles of liquid salt and sugar that you spray on top of the pizza to further boost flavor-creativity-value. We hardly noticed the difference in pies with gluten-free crust and vegan cheese because these elements – normally the foundation of a pizza – are purely structural, like the tortilla in a Chipotle burrito.

 All of this is a long-winded recapitulation of Pizza Studio's mission statement. They're going to be the Chipotle of pizza, which for some reason no one thought of being until now. If you like Chipotle, and you like pizza, you'll want to add this to your lunch routine. Like Pizza Club, you might ask, “do I have to acknowledge my guilt for enjoying a corporate franchised business?” To which we say, “Be who you are.” We had an excellent time at Pizza Studio eating fun, creative personal pan pizzas. We sated our appetites and returned to the office to make shadow puppets on the back wall of a dimly-lit cubicle until 5pm, when we went home to watch TV. One can only hope to move through today's phanstasmic creative economy like a Pizza Studio pie through its turbo-charged toaster oven, and emerge out the other side a certified Masterpiece.



5.5/8 slices

Credits: Scott (pizza photos), Graham (photos & research), and Kate (photos)