Okay...I'm from New York City, fourth generation New Yorker, where we basically invented pizza. My family and I lived in New Zealand for three years between 1994 and 1998, and we ate pizza there.....RARELY.
That was because the pizza in New Zealand was either Pizza Hut...or nothing. I told my wife, "If I knew how to run a pizzeria, I'd come back here with three Sicilian guys, open a pizzeria, and show them how it's done."
Flash forward to 2017. We're back in New Zealand to send our daughter off to her spring term of her junior year at University of Canterbury, and enjoy New Zealand for the first time in 20 years. So we walk into Hellpizza, since the menu looks hilarious -- all the pizzas are the seven deadly sins.
Then we actually try the food...and it was the best darn pizza I'd ever eaten in my entire life. The Kiwis running the place were ASTONISHED, especially on hearing our New York/New Jersey accents.
It really is....the taste was unbelievable.
Now, I'll get ahead of myself here, and refer to ANOTHER Hellpizza. I think it was in Feilding, but I'm not sure. We stopped there on the drive to Dunedin, and ordered pizza. But they had trouble with the oven, so the pizza took more than half an hour.
The embarrassed manager came out and showed us why New Zealanders are the greatest people in the world -- carrying the pizza, she apologized profusely for the delay AND GAVE US OUR MONEY BACK.
That doesn't happen in America.
I have their menu on my desk at work, and I tell people that my plan is not to bring an American pizzeria to New Zealand, but to bring a Hellpizza franchise to New York.
How's that for a reversal of fortune? read more