Pizza prosperity

Pizza Trust

Belvedere Square

529 E. Belvedere Ave

Pizza Club (not its individual members, but the disembodied collective voice of Pizza Club) does not like board games. Pizza Club does not understand board games. Why are they played? What is the source of enjoyment? Especially Monopoly. Monopoly makes us weep with mystification. We were reminded of this when reading up on America’s first Gilded Age, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, which served as the model for that dreaded game. It was a time of unbridled corporate power and greed, dominated by gargantuan trusts – Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan’s US Steel, the Northern Securities Company which briefly owned all the railroads from sea to sea – crushing workers and consumers alike under their heels.

The game of Monopoly, originally intended to make people question the moral legitimacy of this system, famously did the opposite and taught us that cutthroat real estate dealing is wholesome fun for the entire family – which it is, ask Jared Kushner. The abstracted pantomime of the “game,” where everyone starts equal and obeys the same rules, helps our brains accommodate the obscene exploitation of bodies and resources that we observe in the real world. When people threaten to take away the obscene exploitation of bodies and resources, that is called socialism, and it’s the most frightening thing imaginable. There would obviously be nothing left to do that is “fun” under those conditions.

These thoughts bubbled to the surface of Pizza Club’s melty cheesebrain as we visited Belvedere Square, a shopping center just inside the city’s northern limits. In that place has arisen the headquarters of a great Pizza Trust which claims to serve “Baltimore’s best pizza.” The Pizza Trust began operations about a year ago, which makes it quite remarkable that they have already received the designation of “best pizza” from the Pizza Oversight Authorities. Perhaps they acquired some smaller pizza company which came with this superlative, or perhaps the wheels of justice have been greased. Our investigators did turn up an unusual amount of grease, but we conclude that the Pizza Trust is in fact a whimsical evocation of corporate monopoly, and actually controls no means of production beyond the equipment and materials in its humble rented stall. We will first speak of these greasy materials, and then of the game in which the Pizza Trust merely occupies a square within a square within a square. Within a game board that is also just a square in a larger gameboard! Oh my god!

To set the scene, we should clarify that Belvedere Square contains numerous retail spaces arrayed around the large postmodern shed designated “Belvedere Square Market” (the rustic roof conceals a parking deck). The Market is modeled on the public markets of olden days, where various food producers would gather to sell their goods. In the early 1980s, white suburbanites nostalgic for the downtown public spaces they remembered but were afraid to visit built simulacra such as this. The Market offered heavily marked-up produce, meats, dry goods, etc. alongside prepared foods. Today, however, wealthy people have raw foodstuffs delivered to their homes in elaborate plastic sarcophagi; we don’t really know how poor people get food but many of them seem to still be alive. The only reason the bourgeoisie go outside is to visit food halls, and Belvedere Market transformed into the city’s first food hall in the early 2000s with a few gentle strokes of the Invisible Hand.

Though Pizza Trust is not the best pizza in Baltimore, it’s the best pizza we’ve had in a food hall. If in the future the city becomes one giant mixed-use megadevelopment with a food hall on the ground floor/pontoon level, we would nominate Pizza Trust to go there.

The Market Pie (a metonym for the place that used to sell vegetables but now sells only this prepared food with vegetables on it)

Don’t be appalled, dear reader, but Pizza Club doesn’t really want to write about pizza. You should know this by now. We are only continuing the work that began long ago, and will continue as long as cheese exists. Here it goes: the pies at Pizza Trust are oblong and would furnish a meal for two people. You could eat one by yourself if necessary. They offer a creative array of specialties, some quite beautiful in appearance, shimmering with greens, yellows, and reds.

The Mobtown

 The crust is thin, “gentle and light” but with “enough thickness and moisture to be satisfying,” forming a dynamic gradient from soft to crunchy. It has charred spots which release carbon flavor like delicate wisps of smoke. We experienced premium cheese and toppings and inventive use of sauces. Notably, the “Market” pie has a roasted red pepper and carrot sauce that pleased club members, providing the sweetness of a tomato sauce but with an unexpected rooty profile that compliments parmesan. The distance between pepperonis was just right.

Pepperoni (did not write down funny name)

 The specialty pies, though coherently planned around distinct flavor profiles, sometimes indulged in excess. The “Mobtown” balanced so many ingredients that they “rolled off the slice” and left the center of the pie rather damp. “Truffled white sauce” poured from a mushroom slice “like the frosting on toaster strudels.” The mushroom pizza is unpleasantly named the “Funcle”. Also, “truffled.” Why “roasted wild mushrooms” when you have roasted regular mushrooms? It’s fine to just say mushrooms. Your expensive words do not please us.

Funcle

 Quibbles must be aired through the Pizza Club consensus process, but in the end we were very happy with our pizzas, ranking them above other local “fast bake” fare. You don’t go to a food hall specifically for pizza; rather, you go for the scenario of curated choice and once in that scenario, you decide that you want pizza and locate the designated pizza vendor. One Club member spoke of Pizza Trust’s pie as a flattened version of the ubiquitous fast-casual “bowl” format. If you live in the neighborhood, it could be your first-line pizza place – it will make you feel healthier than Pizza Bolis because there is less food. We also appreciated that the pies were quite affordable for this sector of the market – between $10.50 and $12.50 for pies comparable to those which cost $15-$18 at other Neapolitan-style outlets. We have received reports of significant lines at the Pizza Trust during mealtimes.

“Order ye pizzas while ye may,” advised the poet, and so must fans of Belvedere Square do. Pizza Trust has lightheartedly appropriated the “trust” as a vintage aesthetic; the age of railroads and Rockefellers is a funny reference for a local small business staffed by very courteous teenagers. Yet the game is still afoot, and the rent comes due every month. Many businesses have left Belvedere in recent years, finding that even premium prices and a baked-in clientele can’t satisfy this obligation. It’s just another spin around the same board.

The first Belvedere Square was built in 1986 by developer James Ward, II, with a $1.7 million loan from the city which Baltimore forgave twelve years later. By then, many shops had gone under and Ward wanted to switch from local businesses to chain-store tenants – he wound up shuttering the entire site after drawn-out conflicts with business owners and neighborhood groups. A consortium of big-name developers got $4 million from the city and state to redevelop the site in 2003, and Scott Plank’s War Horse LLC launched another rebranding in 2013, building his resume for future bids on public markets around the city. This is a very interesting game in that millions of dollars in public financing magically rains down upon its wealthiest players whenever they roll the dice. War Horse has put the site up for sale again; Plank prefers his assets liquid. We recommend the “truffled white sauce.”

Pizza Trust seems not unaware of this context. “Like historic Belvedere Square Market,” their web copy declares, “The Pizza Trust is an instant classic.” Truly we have no time to wait for history to happen – we must will a fictional past into being, instantly classic, and continually renovate that past to track market trends. Would you get emotionally attached to a square on the Monopoly board? The game was supposed to teach us that losing things is fun. That way we can enjoy the random possibility of winning something new, or getting crushed by those who are winning.

Grand opening, 1986 (The Baltimore Sun)

Elizabeth Magie, Monopoly’s inventor, was one of the first game designers to format the board as a circuit around which players loop until the winner is declared. In Baltimore, it’s easy to trace that loop, with developers circulating through advantaged white-L neighborhoods (except when they build their own luxury islands). Someone else will land on Belvedere Square soon enough. Magie intended for people to play the game according to her now-forgotten “prosperity” rules, in which generous taxes on land and rents are redistributed for public goods determined by all players. For instance, players could nurture the actual public markets and common spaces which Belvedere Square merely evokes, and give everyone pizza. Stories about Monopoly’s unexpected origin tend to assume that this version was incredibly boring and no one wanted to play it. Pizza Club would definitely agree. Why play a game when you can share real pizza?

6/8 slices

Research and photographs: Graham

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

Imitations of metropolitan splendor

Pizzatella of Security Square Mall
6901 Security Boulevard, Baltimore, MD 21244


The southern annex of Security Square Mall, with almost 100% vacancy, frozen escalators, and piles of 90s-era debris accumulating behind burned-out karaoke-club neon, is a harbinger of the post-apocalyptic future in which squatter communities repopulate America's abandoned suburban retail habitats. The mall's central body remains vibrant despite this ghostly appendage; indeed, passing from the hollow, dust-marbled pall of the annex into the main commercial avenue, one feels like a dead soul rudely shaken back to life. The mall's classic design features – luxuriant terraces of tropical plants arranged beneath domed skylights like a cartoon version of nineteenth-century hothouse architecture – gestural fake cornices masking ventilation pipes – invites visitors to take their leisure and edification among the miniature retail environments occupied by slightly off-brand replacements for the major national chains that fled Security Square for newer strip malls. There's a cavernous inflatable-jumping-structure palace for children's parties, a popular Japanese buffet, and a custom menswear shop currently stocking Hawaiian-print suit jackets for summer.

There's also a food court with slightly-askew versions of standard food-court fare. Heated tureens of Chinese noodles glimmer with the promise of the familiar. Up close, things are not what they seem. Pizza Club gravitated towards a jazzy-looking sign for “Pizzatella”. Vaguely evocative – is it a reference to mozzarella? Or piatella, an uncommon Tuscan bean? Pizzatella has customized its niche in the food court panorama with a fake brick oven formed by building a box of red tiles around a normal stacked stainless steel unit, and with some close-up images of Italian food postered on the wall. Multiple flat-screens also show surreally saturated images of pizza.

Pizza Club obtained two huge and perfectly-sliced wedges of cheese and pepperoni pizza. Its shine was so blinding that it may have been a mirage. Scott carefully tracked the progress of this grease through the pies and thence through the layers of paper plates. We found the cheese elastic and toothsome – plausible as real mozzarella – but quickly on the heels of this texture came a chemical aftertaste, suggesting a synthetic cheese whose oil had separated out during re-heating to form the above-noted oily sheen.

The crust was white bread in style, but perfectly toasted and crunchy when fresh from the fake-brick oven. As it cooled, it got chewier and heavier, until the remnant crusts began to weigh down the greasy plates and sag through the vinyl-top tables, pressing towards a dense gravitational center under the mall made from decades worth of agglomerated uneaten pizza crust.

Scott posited that we had just consumed white bread with marinara sauce and American cheese, distorted by the mall's occult aura to look like a fresh, delicious slice of pizza. “My hunger is satisfied, but I'm not sure how I'll feel in an hour,” he stated. In an hour, would he even be the same Scott? Something resembling daylight filtered through the glass dome, amplified by wrap-around mirrors in the ceiling -- the consumer simulacrum of a Crystal Palace -- or a museum of natural history filled with processed cheese.

3/8 slices