Campus Pizza

I believe there are only two pizza places in the plaza: this one, and Pizza Nova. (Though what I got at Meet Point was kind of pizza-like as well. And you can get pizza at East Side Mario's.) In some ways, that surprises me: we have a huge number of Chinese places, for example.

But I can't help but blame the Canadian Dairy Board. (Gentle Reader, you knew it was eventually going to be a rant about the Dairy Board, didn't you?)

(Actually, you probably didn't.)

The Canadian Dairy Board is part of the amazingly complicated and byzantine system by which the supply and cost of dairy products are set here in Canada. Basically, it's extremely difficult to sell imported dairy products here (tarriffs, quotas, etc.), and dairy prices inside the country are kept high by forbidding people to sell dairy products unless they have the "right" to sell it, and that right is itself a commodity that can be bought and sold.

The effect of this is that cheese here is incredibly expensive.

The real reason this most galls me is that the US (which is my native land) also offers high subsidies to dairy farmers, but in the form of payments to farmers, not high prices on dairy. So in the US, cheese is half as expensive.

(So is cream, but that's a rant for another day; I vaguely started that rant when I visited Marble Slab Creamery a couple months ago.)

One consequence of this, I think, is that we eat less pizza in Canada than we otherwise might. The pizza recipe that I make includes 140 grams of cheese (er, 5 ounces) for a pie that serves 2-3 people. That much cheap, boring, bulk mozzarella would cost roughly $2-$3: it's by far the most expensive ingredient in the pizza unless I top it with duck confit. (I, um, don't.)

Restaurants typically have 20%-25% food costs: that is, what you pay is roughly 4-5 times what the cost of the food was. You can't do that affordably when pizza cheese costs that much!

So pizza in Canada has the property of being either cheap and truly lousy, or expensive, and still not necessarily very good. (Ice cream, same story. Don't get me started on "double-churned" ice cream; I didn't realize I needed twice as much air whipped into my dessert!)


This panzerotti was surprisingly good, but also expensive. Though, truly, that's because of the toppings: I had them put onions, anchovies and broccoli in it. I still don't see how that turned into 5 toppings (the broccoli ostensibly was supposed to count for two), but I paid the price of a panzerotti with five toppings. Still, I did enjoy the pie. It was huge: D. had the leftovers for dinner tonight. It came along with a tomato dipping sauce that was "zesty", but also too sweet and blah. But the pie itself was tasty, surprisingly cheesy (given the rant I just gave), and had a generous amount of broccoli. The one meh-ness was that it had a lot of crust, which ultimately tasted like generic toasted white bread. But still, it was good.

I eat their pizza pretty often, as it's one of our common sources for pizza to have when we mark exams, say. This was fresher, and tastier.

I had: A panzerotti with broccoli, anchovies and onions.
I paid: $11.23. I think I was supposed to pay something more like $10, as the plain pie was $5, and each topping another $1 (broccoli counting twice), so this should've been more like $9 + tax = around $10, not $10 + tax = around $11. Ah, well.
Verdict:
Speed: OK, but not great. Still, if I'd been in a hurry, I wouldn't have ordered something that needed to be custom made. I think I waited 10-15 minutes.
Quality: As I said, it had surprising numbers of good things about it. I've never gone to Campus Pizza for lunch directly (just gotten it at university events), and it really was better fresh. I didn't like the tomato sauce, and yet still kept dipping my food in it. This is mildly embarrassing to admit.
Value: I paid too much, but even still, it was a ton of panzerotti, and turned into a lunch for me and a dinner for D. This was certainly fine. Toppings do seem strikingly expensive in general.
Would go back: You know, I rarely feel like pizza for lunch. But I may toss this into the rotation.