The Machinery Powering Pizza

Let's talk about some of the mystical and magical forces bringing us our favorite pizza content.

Hi there!

Sorry for the lapse in newsletters the past few weeks. My life has been a bit unorganized. I think things are finally settling down.

Before we jump into this week’s newsletter, I did find a few more physical copies of my book in my basement. Is anyone interested in them? Maybe I’ll raffle them off or have a giveaway. Stay tuned for more about that!

Okay let’s talk about pizza!

Spak Brother’s Assembly Line

My new favorite family routine is walking down to Two Fray’s, grabbing a picnic table among the other families with kids, ordering Spak and drinking a Kolch. The Two Fray’s courtyard is cozy, remote and sandwiched between buildings. Perfect for the vibes to volley back and forth off the wall, saturating the yard in a unique feeling.

Saturday is a busy night for a pizzeria. Everyone is celebrating the middle of the weekend. Feasting ahead of a slow, no obligation Sunday morning. A time where being a slug isn’t a sin. What better way to go all-out on a Saturday night than a pizza and hoagie combination. I am incapable of not ordering a hoagie from Spak. Every time you load up Spakbrothers.com it should automatically add a hoagie to your cart. That’s a great use of Hoagie Machine Learning ™.

It’s Saturday, I order our pizza, hoagie and fries combo. I head over to Spak a little early to gawk at the symphony of people working in concert to cook and serve pizza (and pizza partners) to the East End population. This is like sitting front row at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Each person a master of their craft, working in tandem to create something more beautiful than they could individually.

As I wait for my order, admiring the harmony of it all, there is a small laptop playing an ancient tennis match. It’s Zverev versus Thiem facing off in the finals of the 2020 US Open. No one is watching this match in the shop or in the stadium. Because of Covid there were no fans in attendance. The entirety of Arthur Ashe is barren as two titans of tennis battle it out for five sets. Thiem would eventually lose the first two sets before winning three in a row and his first US Open title.

The hoagie assembly line is relentless. Feets of bread line the table, carefully balanced and managed to not lose a single grain. There’s one person constructing and placing all the hoagie accessories on the bread. In lesser hands this would devolve into a scene from I Love Lucy or grow unwieldy like Cino’s Mancierge service. For them it’s simply Saturday.

Two people make pizza after pizza while another rotates and rearranges pizzas in an oven. Hardly a word is spoken except when a portion of an order is ready the order number is shouted out. The front of house worker puts all the meals together like a puzzle in a hectic, pizza-themed escape room. Their reward is not escape, but seeing the smiling face of a customer saved from entering the hangry zone.

Seeing Spak operate at a high level of perfection is impressive and awe inspiring. If you’re a fan of Spak you’ll be happy to know that they have new shirts in their store here. These are printed by Common Wealth Press and limited to 100 for each design!

Post-Marathon Pizza Hang

Last time you heard from me I was getting ready to run the Boston Marathon. Well I ran it! It wasn’t my fastest time, but the weather was rough and the course is quite a technical marvel. I finished in the top 1,000 with a time of 2:44, not an awful day at the office. More importantly I got to hang out with my friends and family!

Is Boston a pizza town? I’m not sure what kind of town it is. We ate at Union Park Pizza on Newbury st. This is “Boston’s Favorite Pizza.” We were all hangry and at this point in our lives this was the pizza we needed. Would we seek it out outside of a situation where we are five minutes away from dissolving the family? Perhaps not. But it got the job done.

Award Winning Pizza Now Available at Iron Born Pizza in the Strip District

I heard back from Sara Boyer that her award winning pizza from the International Pizza Competition is now available at their Strip District location! Last I heard from Sara she was experiencing a sourcing issues with the triple smoked Slovenian sausage she used on the pizza.

That issue has been sorted and now you can order it from the location in the Strip! It’s the Vegas Pie and has: Triple smoked Slovenian sausage, smoked mushrooms, garlic cream sauce, black pepper Parmesan crisps.

Even Artificial Intelligence Likes Pizza

I’m a fan of artificial intelligence to a degree. I find Chat GPT much more helpful than Google search. I find it curious that it can’t actually do math and, in theory, knows nothing. It’s great at regurgitating. Most artificial intelligence is creating text / imagery / videos by producing what word / color / image would logically follow the one previous. It does this by learning how to do whatever by absorbing every instance of that thing.

So what AI spits out is a culmination of every mainstream idea ever conjured. Because AI is reliant on examining past work, can it truly create something original? Can it have a point of view? Or is it creating works of art that are incredibly mediocre as if designed and built by committee?

Because current AI is stitching together imagery, words and sounds based on identifying patterns in the media humans have created, it is exploiting our inclination to pattern recognition and nostalgia. I was sent this commercial created by AI by a few people. Now I’m going to come off as a huge hater. This is very novel, and I appreciate the technology, but when it comes to creating new works of art I could not be less impressed by what artificial intelligence spits out.

This pizza commercial reeks of the 90’s. It somehow embodies every idea from that silly era, the taglines the weird coolness it’s trying to exude. This is the video an agency develops after a focus group of twenty millennials talks about how nostalgic they are for the good old days when they didn’t have a care in the world and their biggest worry was if Blockbuster or Iggle Video would have the copy of Chrono Trigger they’ve been trying to beat through consecutive rentals.

Because this technology is reliant on what has been, can it ever create something new and exciting? Or will it remain a fun party trick that is plucking the lowest fruit of humanity?

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Wow that was kind of a weird one today. Hope you got something out of it. Maybe it helped you appreciate an aspect of pizza a little more. I don’t know!

Pizza ya later!

-Dan Tallarico, Pizza Journalist