This is, quite frankly, shocking to hear. To make sense of this, I have a theory.
Little Ceasers sells really cheap pizza. Because they make a ton of pizzas at lunch and put it under the heat lamp, and you come in and ask for a large one topping for $5, and they take it from the heat lamp and put in a box for you. It tastes like cardboard, and once it gets a tad colder, as you get to the last two pieces at your workplace, it tastes like really bad cardboard with cheese that’s kind of not fit for consumption anymore.
But not Armando’s pizza. See, Armando does something else. He orders Little Caesar’s made to order. With more than one topping. It’s fresh out of the oven instead of sitting under a heat lamp. It’s not lunch pizza at all. It’s a fresh pizza with a different crust and sauce and taste. It’s the Little Caesar the rest of us have never seen.
I often have a hard time reconciling Armando’s posts in the cooking thread with his posts about food and beverages in every other thread.
When you expend enormous care and effort in creating your awesomely delicious meals, a little indifferently prepared fast food is a good change of pace.
Timex
2926
Little Caesars is good if you look at it as something other than good pizza. It’s some kind of melty cheesy bread.
But I’d hit it.
Also most fast food is carefully crafted to be as addictive and immediately, gutterally satisfying as possible to the most primal, instinctive parts of our stupid, gullible monkey brains, just a steaming pile of cheaply produced hyper dense fat, salt, and sugar. It’s instantaneous reward for our basest desires, raw id made corporeal.
And it’s goddamn beautiful. Strip away sophistication and grandeur and centuries of haut cuisine and most importantly strip away the illusion that we’re anything more than especially adaptable ravenous animals roaming the savanna in search of our next prey, and what you’re left with is American fast food.
It’s the dark and despairing beauty of a great scarred lioness, buried face deep in the dripping innards of an antelope, still feebly kicking, as if to say, “Wouldn’t it be better to have something braised in a red wine reduction with an aoli foam on top?”
The lioness answers back with the wet cracking of ribs. “No, I’ll have it my way.”
Or, more succinctly, I absolutely fuckin do not ritz up my Lil Cs. Gimme that 8 hour old hot n fresh pep!
Little Caesar’s has become my go-to baseline comparison. If your pizza isn’t better than their Hot-n-Ready, and it most likely costs more, then why should you ever get my money?
And that’s not to say that I think Caesar’s pizza is garbage. Like @Timex, I just think of it as cheesy bread. And again, the comparison works. If your cheesy bread isn’t better than a Little Caesar’s pizza, and if it costs more, you fail.
I won’t say no to a little ceaser’s pizza if I’m hungry and its around. The reason I haven’t had it in years and years is that for the same price/quality, I’d rather have a good frozen pizza. With a couple of boys in the house, we always have a few of those in the freezer.
I’m starting to think maybe my local branch of Little Caesar’s is just bad or something. None of this computes otherwise.
On more positive pizza experiences, I really love getting a slice of cheese pizza from Costco. That was the first cheese pizza where I did a double take and discovered that just plain cheese pizza can taste amazing.
nKoan
2932
We used to go to Little Ceasers all the time when their gimmick was 2 pizzas. But I haven’t been since they pivoted to the Hot and Ready stuff.
That said, it can’t be any worse than Godfathers or Papa Johns.
I worked for Little Caesars in high school. Ate a lot of it. For a long time after I wouldn’t touch their pizza just 'cause I wanted something different, but eventually I’ve gone back a few times. Having had many types of fast-pizza over the years, I’ve decided it’s not really better or worse than the others, just depends on what you’re in the mood for. My first choice these days is Jets, followed by Pizza Hut, then Dominos and Little Caesars, with Papa Johns at the bottom.
I used to be very against Little Caesars for all the cheese bread reasons others have already listed, but then I discovered their deep dish offering. Which is thick cheesy bread with lots of cheese, but can be had with a side of “crazy sauce” (pizza sauce as far as I can tell) as a dip. Dipping their deep dish into that sauce solves all the problems with Little Caesars being under-sauced cheese bread, and the deep dish dough is much better than their default pizza dough.
I share the disdain others have posted about Little Caesars regular pizzas, but I eat the heck out of the deep dish stuff.
Back in the early 90s when I had Little Caesar’s, that’s what I had. We always ordered two deep dish pizzas for something like $8.88 or something crazy low like that. But I was a poor college student who knew very few people who owned cars, so it was a rare luxury to convince someone to drive to Little Caesar’s for pizza. That was good stuff though. Certainly better than Dominos and Pizza Hut from that same era, even though stand up comedians made fun of them more. But them lacking delivery meant I never could arrange for having that very often.
People with cars were so reluctant to let them be used for anything. Mostly if we wanted to get something, we had to use Yellow Cab. Which was expensive as hell.
Timex
2936
If there was some little Caesar’s on my desk right now, I would totally eat it.
I haven’t had Little Caesar’s since about 1996, but this thread is making me want to give them a try again…
imo, their sauce has way too much sugar (the dipping sauce, to be clear)
Holy shit, this is ART.
Same for other things, too. Due to a lack of options, I picked up a jar of Heinz seafood cocktail sauce a while back. I don’t know what they were thinking, but I’m all set if I ever decide to make horseradish-flavored jelly donuts.
I was fairly proud of that reply; thank you :-)
