“Oh yes we did.”
With a knowing smile, the head chefs at Domino’s Pizza are saying this when asked if they reinvented their pizza.
Yes, that’s right. This isn’t your father’s Domino’s Pizza or even your older sister’s. A call to Domino’s Pizza (or even one of those fancy online orders) will bring a completely new product that company representatives proclaim actually “tastes good.”
But it wasn’t enough for the culinary scientists behind the unstoppable fountain of authentic Italian cuisine to start churning out unforgettable pizza after unforgettable pizza. That would be too easy. It was also time for a John McCain-esque “straight talk” to the pizza company’s constituency.
Not since the moon landing have Americans been more enraptured by a single piece of video footage, but Domino’s breakthrough four-minute documentary, boldly called “The Pizza Turnaround,” proclaimed what all Americans knew to be a self-evident truth: Domino’s sucked.
In the groundbreaking documentary, Domino’s executives and employees commented on the common complaints that everyone universally espoused for years to degrade and demean the once-proud organization. “It tastes like cardboard,” the naysayers said. “The sauce is like ketchup,” they taunted.
At this point, Domino’s could have given up, sure. Worse, the pizza company could have ignored their harshest critics and continued to manufacture “classic” Domino’s pizza. The company was still speedy and efficient. It was just the pizza itself that everyone was complaining about, a minor detail when one truly gives this pizza controversy some real thought.
But no, that wouldn’t be the Domino’s way. And now the company, known for its lightning-fast delivery and breathlessly convenient ordering process, also has the pizza to match. Domino’s Pizza chefs Sam Fauser and Brandon Solano were acting like modern-day James K. Polks, looking to achieve their manifest destiny of cornering the pizza market.
Still don’t believe? Well don’t take Domino’s word for it. In the documentary’s sequel, as hotly anticipated as “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” and “The Dark Knight” combined, the two chefs traveled to the doorsteps of the company’s harshest critics from previously conducted focus groups. To quantify the raw guts it took to do that, one would have to combine the determination of Rocky Balboa in “Rocky IV” going against the Russian boxer Ivan Drago and combine that with a pre-Mike Huckabee-supporting Chuck Norris’s never-say-die attitude.
How did the critics, these cavalier slanderers, respond to the new recipe? Assuming that the accounts Domino’s chose to include in its video were all of them, only 100 percent positively. The pizza cooks were winning people over so quickly that they barely had enough time to exchange a high five in between. But they made time.
Does Domino’s courage know no bounds? According to the Jan. 11 Slate Magazine article entitled “Like Cardboard,” Slate scribe Seth Stevenson said, with the company bashing its former, inferior product, there would be no going back. “There can be no Domino’s Classic,” he said.
What Stevenson fails to see is that one does not need to go back when it’s done right the first time. New Domino’s is no New Coke, and it shows just in the lack of a Domino’s name change.
While it may be true that not everyone is talking about Domino’s Pizza, the new pizza has been featured on such shows as “The Colbert Report” and CBS’s “The Early Show.” And when Stephen Colbert and whoever is on “The Early Show” take notice, one knows they are onto something.
The bottom line is this: With their backs against the wall, Domino’s executives sent their crack culinary scientists into a room somewhere in the back of the building to scurry about and come out with something that would cure America’s appetite. And not since the invention of Tang has science tasted so delicious.
Oh yes they did.