Comment by Kon-Peki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kon-Peki | Hacker News Reader

I worked at an all-you-can-eat buffet as a teenager in the 1990s.

Our big fill-you-up-cheap item was pizza. The ingredient cost for pizza is ridiculously low, even for above-average quality ingredients. An entire pizza was likely $0.50 or so, depending on toppings.

The restaurant oven was this giant gas-fired thing with 5 or 6 circular, rotating stone surfaces with each set to its own temperature. The pizza stone was set somewhere between 550 and 600° F.

My main job was making the pizza, and they were good. Definitely better than anything you could get at a Pizza Hut or Dominos or Little Caesars. People would even ask for custom pizzas, and management didn't care. You put it out on the buffet line and wave at them so they know it's ready. Of course, while they're waiting they aren't eating other things...

The restaurant also had a little game room with arcade machines that spit out tickets for cheap prizes. Kids would have a slice or two of pizza and then run off to play games, making their visits especially profitable.

> all-you-can-eat

> pizza

> cheap

> arcade machines

This all sounds too much like heaven to be true.

Honestly, the simplest pleasures are often not inherently expensive

In college me and a roommate would go to a cici's pizza on sunday. We usually got there right before the tball groups came in. So you'd see these 2 20 somethings in line ahead of an entire team of kids, and they would just watch us with concern and awe as we piled our plates high, lol.

My roommate could eat so much pizza I'm sure some of those kids were worried they'd run out.

Sounds like Chuck-E-Cheese.

Chuck-E-Cheese doesn't give you all-you-can-eat pizza. But yes, there's a reason it was popular.

That’s literally Cici’s. They have 300 locations in the US.

> They have 300 locations in the US.

That implies a wide distribution, but digging a little deeper, about half of their 280 locations are in Texas.

90s energy prices… cooking pizza costs much more now.

Heaven is a CiCi's Pizza or Mr. Gattis!

I feel like pizza is one of those things where the ingredients are really cheap, but much of the value is in the special equipment needed to make it really well. Normal people don't have a 600F pizza oven, so even with the same ingredients they just can't make the same kind of product.

For some definition of normal, to be sure.

My normality has been surrounded by people that make their own stuff, from septic systems, to custom cars, to work sheds, to brick barbeques and to wood fired pizza ovens.

There's an entire state here of people that wouldn't see that as much of a challenge to build or aquire if they wanted good pizza.

For years we just used the annealing oven out the back next to the glass furnaces .. other people had other ways.

A population able to build a massive pizza oven if they wanted to, is rather different than most homes actually having one.

I described a population of individuals each able to build a pizza oven, with those that want one having one.

There's not much challenge to a 320 degree Celsius oven (or 600 F in some parts of the world, apparently).

I agree that the oven made a huge difference. I wouldn't be surprised if its value was greater than the aggregate of everything else in the restaurant.

It's none of the chains anyone mentioned. It was just a single place in a dying rustbelt town, and closed up a decade or more ago.

In hindsight, it was obvious that this kind of place depended on being able to hire labor that it could pay less than it was worth. The dream around there was to snag one of the few steel mill jobs that was left, yet almost everyone I worked with went off to college and never came back. We all worked hard and used our brains. For example, they had tuned the oven such that a pizza was cooked in two revolutions of the stone. By using the peel to place the pizza in different spots on the stone you could vary the amount of time the pizza was actually in the oven without needing to set a timer or keep track of anything. Because, as you know, the perfect cooking time depends on the toppings ;). If you've ever watched a Pizza Hut/Dominoes/Papa John's/etc, you'll see that they just throw the pizza on a conveyor belt and forget about them. Everything gets cooked the same exact amount of time (in an over that looks horrendous for energy efficiency!).

Solution: 'slow' cooking at 250C. First put the dough in the oven, then put it back in with toppings.

> Definitely better than anything you could get at a Pizza Hut or Dominos or Little Caesars.

It's a shame that bad pizza is so popular, when good pizza is relatively cheap to make.

In Finland, a pizza-buffet chain has been one of the most common all-you-can-eat experiences. However, the catch is that you pay extra for drinks. I find the pizzas are so incredibly salty that I suspect they are intentionally made such to force drink purchases. (Like the old salted peanuts at a bar trick.) The pizzas might initially look enticing, but the magic wears off after just a few minutes of eating there.

At least in one of the chains drinks are included. Ice cream is optional extra. Not sure what is the other chain. And if one is around where I live.

I worked at a Dominoes in the 80s/90s. The manager there said the markup on those was about 800%, so even when as employees we got to buy them at half price, they still made bank on them.

Mr. Gatti's Pizza?

oh god i havent thought of this in a long time

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