Pizza Wars

Down the street from where I live sit two businesses in opposition: Damgoode Pies and U.S. Pizza. As you can probably guess, they both serve pizza. Their buildings stand across the street from one another like duelists trading jabs and parries of words. To some, it may seem like a friendly rivalry of businesses. To me, there’s something more there.

U.S. Pizza was the first place I tried when we moved down there, in part due to some genuine confusion on my part. I thought Damgoode served pies in the strictest sense like apple pies and all that. My assumption had perhaps been informed by the hipster sensibilities of our neighborhood and the refusal to believe that two pizza places that weren’t national chains would shack up so close to one another. Like many of my assumptions, this was incorrect.

Subtle digs from U.S. Pizza derided Damgoode’s holiday hours this past Christmas, proudly announcing that they were open for Christmas Eve, unlike Damgoode. More recently, Damgoode announced on their marquee, “10% OFF FOR U.S. PIZZA EMPLOYEES.” As they say on the Interwebs, shots fired. It’s impossible to maintain a conscientious objection to an all-out pizza war, especially when you yourself are an acolyte of the Cult of Piethagoras. The line was drawn long before we arrived. I’d have to pick eventually. Thankfully, the decision wasn’t difficult.

My U.S. Pizza experience was nothing incredible. The pizza was good, but it wasn’t anything special. It seemed no different from any other thin crust pizza I’d had before. A few weeks later, we tried Damgoode, and it was an entirely different culture. U.S. Pizza is fairly straightforward: it’s a restaurant that serves pizza. No bells and whistles, just pizza and sandwiches and the like. Nothing unique about the restaurant except that you could bring your dog in, but that’s it.

Damgoode, on the other hand, was like an embassy to a college town. The waiters and cooks are laid back, which is good because they’re the first people you see when you enter the building. Seating’s upstairs since most of the first floor is the kitchen and bathrooms, but it works. Coming upstairs, you’ll hear some music that sounds like it’s someone’s Pandora station. On the wall to your right is a large mural of a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon like a shrine to cheap beer. Get there for Happy Hour and you can have a can of your own for 75 cents.

I haven’t even discussed the pizza. They have multiple sauce options. Red sauce, pesto, spicy white, alfredo and combinations between. We usually go for their “pink,” a combination of red and white that gives the sauce a gentle kick. Want some pizza with more pizza? Order the stuffy, a stripped down stuffed pizza. Nothing groundbreaking or innovative, but compared to their rivals, Damgoode is remarkably imaginative. Some don’t want or need that with their pizza. Some just want their pizza simple and familiar, and they are welcome to that refuge of culinary cowards.

Never before had I been on the sidelines of a conflict between two pizza restaurants. Back home, I had placed I’d like to go for a pie, but none ever seemed in direct opposition, perhaps due in part to the fact that there were so many that they were just top dogs in their respective towns. I had Papa Del’s in Champaign, Pagliai’s in Charleston, Villa Pizza in Mattoon—miles between them so no chance for bad blood. No room for hostility. Just pizza.

Now every time I go to Damgoode, it feels like a political act, a greasy shake of the first to U.S. Pizza. Twice we’ve gone to U.S. since our move, and so many more times have we patronized Damgoode. It’s not a conscious middle finger we throw their way, but the hostility fostered between the two contextualizes the gesture with more hate than we intend. Perhaps it is we, then, who are the casualties in the pizza wars, our clogging arteries the collateral damage.