My Quest For A Completely Average Pizza

Maya Kosoff
5 min readMay 5, 2021

Last week I moved into a new apartment. Moving is a horrible task, and even though I tried to do a bunch of things that would ostensibly make my life easier during the move — renting those reusable plastic bins instead of getting moving boxes; calling around to find the mover who would give me the best quote; arranging several furniture deliveries so that things would arrive at my apartment the day I got here — life, as they say, had other plans for me. My moving bin company ghosted me. My movers lectured me on the stripped screws holding together my bedframe and told me they couldn’t reassemble it for me in my new apartment (I didn’t know!! I bought it on Craigslist!!!!) so I slept on my mattress on the floor for several nights like a 22 year old drummer living in a living room converted into a bedroom in Bushwick. I’m still waiting for the vintage dresser I bought to arrive and yet I have the gall to be offended it’s still not here, like I didn’t buy it from a stranger on Instagram.

This is all to say that at the end of moving day when I realized I didn’t know how my patio doors locked, the shower curtain rod fell down, and I found a spider crawling over the aforementioned mattress on the ground, the only thing in the world I wanted was to eat a middling slice of pizza. I went over to my boyfriend’s apartment (due to the unlockable patio doors, the fallen shower curtain, and the spider) and asked him if he wanted pizza. Specifically what I asked him was: “Do you want like a Saraghina pizza, or like, pizza place pizza?” Thankfully, he chose the latter. Then came the ordeal of looking through the pizza places on the pizza place-specific delivery app I’ve used since 2019.

Now that’s what I’m talking about. Photo by Alan Hardman on Unsplash

I knew exactly what I wanted, and exactly what I didn’t want. In this moment, what I didn’t want was a woodfire oven baked pizza with crispy dough that came in a size that only served one person and still necessitated you buying a $17 side salad to fully satiate you. I didn’t want fancy ingredients. No pesto, artichoke, anchovy, garlic scape, or expensive cured meat would ever touch this pizza. Give me the slightly too sweet and tinny tomato sauce, the undesirably chewy crust, the perfectly pedestrian toppings. Give me the whole shebang delivered with one of those little plastic tables set in the center of the pie so the top of the pizza box doesn’t touch the…

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Maya Kosoff

i’m a freelance writer and editor. you can also read me in places like the new york times and vanity fair.