At the risk of sounding like an ad I’m kind of startled at how not-terrible Little Caesars is for the price. A lot of food and a completely reasonable tasting and baked pie for stupid cheap when compared to almost everything else.
Costco pizzas fill that niche for me. Ton of food for $10, somewhat better than Little Caesers, and until cost cutting measures during the pandemic, a very passable combo pizza.
Costco's pizza works out pretty damn well on a just-get-some-calories-in-me-but-don't-make-me-cook basis, too, if you want something you can carry out. Two days of calories for $10.
I don't know what it is now, but Cici used to have $1.99 all you can eat pizza buffets on certain days of the week. This would have been in the mid 90s. Unbelievably (suspiciously?) cheap even for then.
Little Caesars used to be so much better. This was the time period when they were selling you two pizzas on a paper-wrapped flat for the price of one major chain pizza.
Not sure when they switched to extreme value focus.
Even the late Anythony Bourdain could espouse on the greatness of an "objectively terrible" Wafflehouse meal.
There's a time and place for everything, and even the snobbiest of us food snobs can appreciate the time and place for the likes of Little Ceasars, Costco Pizza, Wafflehouse, et al.
I also love Waffle House's food despite, maybe even because, it's 'bad'. Their waffles are legit good; the rest is coffee shop slop of the highest order. Recommended. (Glad Bourdain had the guts to say this)
I contend Anthony Bourdain didn't actually know good food from bad. I have nothing against him, I enjoyed his show, it was quite engaging, and I wanted him to dispense good information--so I could use it--but his recommendations, for instance in the NY City area, were awful. (he prided himself on not describing the food he was trying, all he ever would say it is, "that's good".)
His career as a chef was at a brasserie serving brasserie fare which is basically like working at a French diner, not necessarily anything that's going to educate your palate.
Again, not criticizing him, I'm actually envious, I wish I could be happy eating mediocre food, my life would be much simpler.
The elevation of haute cuisine as “good” and common folk food as “mediocre” is strange to me.
Sometimes a cheap-ass $5 meal really does satisfy people far more than a Michelin star restaurant. Humble bragging about only being able to enjoy non-normie food sounds silly and unrefined, really.
I'm not referring to that. I'm referring to things like "what's the best pho" or pizza or pupusa or ramen
I do think as a chef learning haute cuisine is learning useful things about cooking and what makes some bread better than other bread, and what consistency a sauce should have and how to achieve it.
Little Ceasars is worse a in that it’s a bad pizza that gets worse over time. It sort of tastes like nothing until it cools, at which point it tastes like cardboard.
That doesn't mean he would have liked little ceasers. If anything, it really seems like you don't understand his point about the charm of waffle house.
This is how I explain my refusal to learn anything about the varieties and nuances of "good coffee". If I learned to appreciate good coffee, would I still be able to enjoy common dinner coffee? I fear not.
I'm fairly sure I have a well-above-average ability to appreciate actually-good coffee and actually-good pizza—but am also genuinely happy with the bad stuff, even though I'm entirely aware it's bad (within reason—I've had a couple gas station cups of coffee that weren't just bad, but wrong, and I wasn't able to finish them, and instant coffee usually gets a polite "no thanks" from me, but if Folger's or Kirkland Ground or whatever is what you've got, I'll be truly grateful to have it)
I'm not that way with wine and beer. I don't like bad wine or beer at all. I will turn it down or just drink it to be polite, not enjoying it a bit.
I think the difference is I never liked bad wine or beer, while I started out liking bad pizza and bad coffee before I learned what the good stuff tasted like. So, you might be safe.
[EDIT] Reflecting more on this, part of it may be that I regard bad coffee and bad pizza as pretty much totally different things from good varieties of the same—I just happen to like both. I don't really consider one a substitute for the other, I guess. Bad coffee is just coffee-flavored... but I like coffee flavor! Good coffee has all kinds of flavors going on. If you're interested in getting into that, I recommend finding a highly-regarded local roaster doing a tasting event—I personally find it much easier to get into a new flavor-related thing, such that I can start to understand it and pick out various notes, if I can do side-by-side tastings of various examples of the thing, all in a short span.
It's similar with beer and wine, I just happen not to like "beer-flavored" or "wine-flavored", the way I do like coffee-flavored coffee or find greasy bread smeared with salty cheese and tomato sauce satisfying even if it's pretty awful—get me the nice stuff that has more going on and I'm in heaven, though.
One of my favorite coffee experiences was on an Amtrak. The cup of coffee was $2. It was served on a Pepsi branded paper tray thing. Carrying it up the narrow staircase was fun. I enjoyed every sip. It tasted like cream and sugar and the coffee my grandma used to make out of a metal tin.
It's a one-way street. You can love cheap poorly brewed coffee but once you have tried better the cheap stuff becomes undrinkable. Like going from a touch tone back to a rotary dial phone. Impossible.
Until my early mid 20s I never like coffee at all. Then I tried double cream and sugar coffee, then milky cappuccinos, then massive syrupy sweet Starbucks.
After years of "acclimatizing" I thought I'd branch out. I bought a grinder, fresh coffee beans, a scale, French Press, 16:1 ratio. I went black and never went back.
Coffee made well from fresh beans freshly ground has a sweetness a caramel like after-taste. Very little bitterness (comes from brewing too long) and can surprise even those who pile on milk and sugar or even salt to mask its bitterness.
All that fancy coffee prep still doesn't give you what a good diner coffee delivers though: a warm hug after a long night, or hanging with friends, or a big family breakfast, or talking with a potential soul mate after a first date... or countless other things I associate with drinking coffee in a diner
I don’t know. I make my own espresso drink every morning with locally roasted beans, but about twice a month I got to a cheap diner for breakfast and slurp down 3 cups of their black coffee with a smile on my face.
You can enjoy anything if you try hard enough. I go to great lengths to get the best coffee and prepare it in the best way possible, but I'm still very happy to drink an imperfect cup of coffee. Some of the worst coffee I can imagine is whatever they serve on American Airlines flights. It has such a weird flavor, I'm not even sure it's actually coffee. With all of that in mind, I am looking forward to drinking the next cup of airline coffee that is offered to me ;) It's something different, even if it's different in all the wrong ways.
The trick is to learn to enjoy all coffees for what they are. I'll take gas station murk in a pinch, and I'll drink it black when no options are available. But I also love coffees that are $10-15 per pound. But I usually buy in the $7 range. It's about being content, not being snobby, no matter how much you spend.
Edit: Agreeing with another commenter in this thread that some coffees at gas stations are truly awful and are immediately thrown away. Those aren't legit coffee though, and don't count toward what I said above.
This might be wise advice. I have spent a lot on gear, and I buy bags that are typically around $30/lb, although there are some great blends that can be picked up for around $15/lb.
It has ruined the cheap (Robusta) coffee for me. There are diners that make a great medium roast cup and use Arabica beans.
But the good coffee sure is good, and it’s fun to get familiar with the varieties.
I'd never defend Little Caesar's as amazing pizza but it does exactly what it's supposed to, i.e. hits the spot when you're looking for primal satisfaction of a craving for a greasy pile of dough and cheese. When I want "real" pizza I walk down the street for something Neapolitan or NY-style but if I'm hanging with a large group of friends and feel like pigging out then I see nothing wrong with going all-in for some Deep Deep Dish from LC.
Seconded, cannot relate. They're worth the $6 or whatever but not a penny more. Better than most $6 frozen pizzas, I suppose. They have that going for them.
They're also a good example of this, actually. They'd held their $5 price point for a long time but had gradually been cutting toppings until they were comically bare. Then they introduced a $6 "extra toppings" (or something, I don't recall the way they phrased it) pie that just had the same amount the normal ones used to.
Post-Covid I'm pretty sure the sad-pie price is up to $6, and the actually-has-toppings edition is $7.
In my metro area they increased prices to $7. However, quality has drastically improved. If you haven't tried em recently they are very different than the old thin, taste like nothing, Little Caesars pizzas.
Are they using real cheese nowadays (even bulk processed cheese)? If so, perhaps they have improved. The last time I had one (which was admittedly a long time ago) they were using some kind of "imitation cheese-flavored product" or something along those lines.
I'm bistellar: I love both Star Wars and Star Trek.
But I fully realize that Bladerunner is astronomically better than either of them.
And none of those masterpiees keep me from fully enjoying smutty trash like Space Truckers, or even any of Philip K Dick's horrible random short stories.
