Pizza

Pizza Party

It used to only be 3M. the tiny crusty doughy pizza sold on supermarket corners all over. The booth had dozens of boxes of pre prepared pizza, a woman standing by and a small hot plated oven to reheat your orders.

The pizza itself was crusty and doughy, covered by a ketchup-y sweet tomato sauce, large shreds of cheese and one teeny square piece of cooked ham near the center.

We loved those pizzas.

Shakey's came a few years after. You either had to go there to eat, or have someone pass by to order take out.

I remember that everyone used to call it shake-y-s but Mama and Papa insisted that it was pronounced shock-ees.

I don’t know why.

When you do go there to eat, as you enter, you could smell the distinctive smell of the restaurant…all smoky and spicy.

There you could sit near the counter where you could watch them make the individual pizzas, which were all thin and crisp.

This was such a novelty that most kids left their hand and cheek prints on the glass divider in an effort to try to see more.

There was a small stage in every restaurant too. They would show cartoons and Charlie Chaplin movies. Not all the time, but we would catch it every so often. I think sometimes, they even had small bands playing there too.

On birthday parties, we would order a couple of pizzas, a pitcher of root beer and a pitcher of regular beer for the grownups. Sometimes, we’d get chicken and Mojo’s too

Yum.

Pizza hut came a few years after. They were the first to introduce the thick and chewy pan pizza. I think this one was the one which offered the “real pizza” that Dad said a “real” pizza should be. Lots of toppings and real mozzarella cheese that when first bitten, would create strings of long pale yellow strands from your mouth to the pizza slice.

Our favorite branch was the one in Cubao, at the corner of Fiesta carnival and SM shoe mart. We’d go there some Sundays, to buy a couple of things, then go on a few rides in the Carnival, usually the caterpillar and the one that was full of air and shaped like a giant tomato. The one you bounce around in? Anyway, eventually, we would find each other by meeting up at Pizza hut at a predetermined time.

Just Eating

A few years later, they finally opened the branch at Delta and Dad brought us there one time, bearing a small tin of anchovies. He had them sprinkle bits of anchovy flakes into and over the pizza giving off teeny burst of saltiness in every bite.

The thing was, was that dad had built us up so much on what a “real pizza” should be, that the first time, Jo Ann, Mom, and I went to the United States, we very excitedly came directly from the airport and just had had had to have a “real” pizza.

So we asked for the number of a pizza place, ordered ourselves a pizza. Large, as there were three of us, and of course, with added anchovies, which, at the time, was Mom’s favorite add-on ingredient

When it came….Oh my! Not only was the pizza so enormous we couldn’t possibly eat it all in one sitting, ( maybe if we ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a couple of days… maybe) It was easily three times as big as the normal “large” we get back at home… and the anchovies!!!

There was an anchovy the size of a small galunggong, a whole entire fish, in the center of every single slice… eeyew.

No wonder a lot of people don’t like anchovies in their pizza.

Pizza delivery eventually came along with other food deliver services. We used to order almost nightly because Eric just loved Pizza. We rotated “requesting” mom to “make us libre pizza’. We had a mental tally on who should ask mom next…mainly because Eric didn’t want to ask Mom all the time. We would alternate between Pizza places but we used to order so often that all we had to do was call, say “Delivery for Eric’…and they would start quoting our own address, telephone number, and gate color to us before we could even continue on with his Family name.

It went kind of like this…

“Order for Eric…”

“Of xx-xxxx Street? xxxx xxxxxxx Quezon City? Brown gate?”

“…Reyes”

I sometimes laugh at the thought of another Eric who’d order pizza…we might get his order by mistake… Knowing us, we’d probably pay for it anyway and eat it…The other Eric can just go hungry.

Suki kami eh.

One time, during Christmas, the regular pizza delivery boy actually sent us a Christmas card. It wasn’t Shakey's but his own store bought Hallmark Greeting Card. Because he sees us nightly and I guess to him, we were almost friends.

It was very sweet.

And on his last day as delivery boy, he came to the house to tell us he was leaving, that he probably wasn’t going to see us again and he just wanted to make paalam.

I wonder whatever happened to him.

teaching Laurie how to eat