Here’s a question I’ve been wrestling with for an entire week: When is too much pizza too much? Or put in a way that might even make sense: Can you ever have too much pizza? Well, I think we all know the answer to that quixotic query, but I’m not necessarily talking about excessive hoovering of heavenly pies of pizza. No I mean pizza as a subject, a topic, a theme. Specifically for a weekly newspaper column.
You may remember that last week’s column was indeed about pizza and the miniature one-room Pizza Hut in New York and my minor obsession with the precious pie made by Tom’s House of Pizza, formerly in Red Deer, now only in Calgary.
And here I am a second time, an entire week later, yammering on about pizza. But I can hear you asking, why on earth would you even consider writing about pizza two weeks in a row? Well, this week, a week of American politics and the impending collapse of the free world as we know it, something finally cheered me up. I got a nice email from a kind reader named Guy H. who said my “pizza piece” (good one, Guy!) “took him back” and that he was even “starting to tear up a bit”. Well, Guy, who hasn’t teared up over the moving memory of a perfect piece of pizza pie? I know I have.
But Guy’s point – and it is an excellent one – is that his favorite past pizza palace was not “Tom’s” but “Dave’s” as in “Dave’s Pizza”. And I couldn’t agree more. Which begs another question: Is it okay to have two favorites? If so, I’m adding Dave’s Pizza to my favorite list. In fact I have much more, well, history with Dave’s than any other pizza joint – almost all of it markedly memorable.
To start with, Dave Nobes – the Dave in Dave’s – was a good friend of mine. In fact he and I and a couple of other reprobates started a golf tournament. A crazy golf gathering for poor to pathetically poor golfers. It was called “Hookers & Slicers” and we averaged 20-30 whack-damn club-swingers every year. For ten years! But I digress.
Dave’s Pizza pizza was the exact opposite of the quality of the Hookers & Slicers golf. Guy mentioned his go-to pie: “Nothing like a #13 with ham, onions, smoked oysters and I think maybe anchovies” and while that pizza would cause anyone to immediately tear up it’s a testament to the Dave’s talent that he could make a pizza with slimy sea slugs into somebody’s favorite.
His first restaurant in town was in the old Safeway Port-O-Call plaza, a place we called “the office” and where we all congregated after, during, and before the party or the dance hall. It was the first pizza place I took my NGF (New Girl Friend) (who was and still is my Better Half) and where my ruffian friends made sure they met her and embarrassed me (and her) by piling into our private little booth with us.
It was where, at 2:00 am, a friend (Anonymous) who was on a coffee break from his job as a City road equipment operator decided to show off by roaring around in the empty parking lot doing donuts in his massive street sweeper. Thing is, it was one of those tall wobbly three-wheelers and he tipped the huge machine over in a crashing cloud of dust and mayhem. Later, I’m sure Dave consoled him and his loss of employment with a free pizza or two.
Dave Nobes is gone now but he was one of the good ones, and so was his pizza. Because really, a pizza place is about so much more than pizza, isn’t it?
Harley Hay is a Red Deer author and filmmaker. Reach out to Harley with any thoughts or ideas at harleyhay99@gmail.com.
