Lunch special: Every Day Special, $4.99 for one slice of pizza, a salad and a soda
Fake plant count: 50
Chicks in short shorts and heels count: 0
You ever been to Fireside Pies? The pizza there is outstanding. It just sucks that you're out standing on the porch for an hour with all the undershirtless dudes playing with their hair and the chicks picking their wedgies before you get seated. Don't get me wrong—I like free Tuaca shots from the ever-present Free Tuaca Shot Girls. It's the high-speed munchkinspeak of all the pretty single people yell-talking at each other at once that gets to me after a bit. Buying a pizza there costs you some dignity and a hefty chunk of change.
So when I want dignity-preserving pizza for fewer bucks, I head over to Lovers Pizza and Pasta in the strip mall at 5605 W. Lovers Lane. Inside, there's the appropriate amount of green, red and white. Leaning Tower of Pisa painting? Check. And, most important, they offer just the kind of lunch special I'm looking for: The Every Day Special is one slice of pizza, plus a salad and a soda for $4.99. It's the New York-style pizza that I love, minus the guy from New York glaring at me when I ask for a side of ranch dressing. (What? Just because I dip my pizza in ranch dressing doesn't mean I'm a member of a whorority. The fact that I ordered my slice with sausage on it might make me a slut, but ordering it with a side of ranch dressing certainly doesn't. I can see where that might be confusing, but I checked with the local Krappa Suckma Tittles and after they saw my "Your face gives me The Diarrhea" shirt, they confirmed that they'd never, ever, ever be associated with me or my unsanctioned ranch-dressing-on-pizza-ing. At least I didn't eat it with a fork. Eating pizza with a fork gives you scabies.)
Their New York-style pizza is enormous. And they have tiny napkins at the table, which magnify the feeling that you're about to eat a circus-large slice of pizza. It's such a big ol' honking America-portioned piece of pizza that after one bite, your nutritionist is like, "Cool. You're at your calorie count for the day. You can stop now. Seriously. Stop now—what about the carbs, Alice? Now you're dipping it in ranch dressing? What are you, some sorority slut?" And I'm like, "Whatever, nutritionist. I had a salad to start. And everyone knows that salad calories beat pizza calories in the rock-paper-scissors of food, so the pizza calories don't count." It's fun to watch a nutritionist's head explode.
Go to Lovers Pizza and Pasta. I challenge you to get the Every Day Special every day.
