What do we mean when we talk of 'good pizza'?
Do good ingredients and good cooking skills ultimately lead to a good pizza?
Is there such a thing as a perfect form of good pizza?
What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a pizza to be good?
Is what makes a pizza good based purely on subjective experience or post digestion qualia?
These philosophical questions are difficult to answer so this review will begin with a case study of four Manchester students' experience with Mamma Mia's pizza.
It is four minutes to eight on a Saturday night in Fallowfield. My friend has just ordered two large Mamma Mia's specials by phone (0161 225 6563). The phone was answered promptly and the owner was very polite and soft spoken (my friend later commented about the soothing nature of his voice). There were some issues with the phone line, but I think they were on our end. We were offered the choice between deep pan and thin base. We decided to have one of each. the total cost came to £13.50 including delivery. Delivery time was estimated to be half an hour to forty-five minutes.
Forty five minutes have just passed. The room is full of debate by my house mates. the hungriest is complaining and incessantly looking out of the window, and being fooled by the neighbors thinking they are the pizza delivery person. Some of the less starved or more positive minded housemates are explaining how only one minute has gone by since the stated delivery time passed. There is also talk of the possibility that our house is hard to find (although this was refuted), and a reminder that Mama Mia's isn't a chain establishment.
Pizzzzzaaaaaaaaa.
Nine minutes to nine, fifty five minutes after we first ordered and ten minutes after the most conservative of delivery time estimates, the window watcher spots a car pull up outside. He narrates as the man takes out his phone, dials a number and holds it to his ear. There are screams of delight as my friends' phone rings.
Unfortunately, we received two deep pan pizzas and NO THIN BASE!!!! This lead to confusion in splitting up the pizza because we were unsure whether to swap slices given they all looked the same.
The pizzas were covered in a myriad of fresh toppings. There was some complaint as to the stodginess of the dough, although others described the same dough as soft and filling. Four faces were filled for less than £3.50 each, and only one of us had to leave the room to let the guy in (apart from the phone friend who had to get his phone from the next room, but this is his own fault and we cannot realistically blame Mamma Mia's for his blunder). In comparison to the general climate of the pizza market in Manchester, Mamma Mia's offers a high quality pizza but still at an affordable price.
The experience was an overall success, but the pizza could have been a bit faster, and packed a bit less dough attack on the stomach, please.
In an effort to relate this case study back to the initial questions raised as to what we mean when we talk about good pizza it seems two diametrically opposed view points can be taken.
In the externalist account, factors such as delivery time, customer service, aesthetics of the pizza and general customer experience take a prominent role in determining the formation of judgments regarding quality of pizza, and so in deciding whether a pizza can be called good or bad.
In the internalist account, psychological and subjective factors are more prominent when forming judgments. Factors include taste qualia, texture, temperature, hunger (including previous pizza consumption), the extent to which the experience matches expectations and the opinions of reviews read on qype.co.uk, notably Camieee (2008) "The pizzas, then, are fantastic".
There is a great folly in thinking solely in dichotomies. In reality, the goodness of a pizza is likely to be determined by a mixture of the these two view points. Taking an holistic approach it becomes clear that Mamma Mia's pizza has both its merits and demerits. The internalist and externalist accounts are useful in highlighting the determining factors in making judgments about any given pizza's goodness.
All that can be said assuredly is that the pizza was quite nice and, I guess, didn't take too long to arrive.
References:
Camieee, 2008 "This was a personal tip from a friend...", qype.co.uk, September 2nd.
As a personal note, we hope Camieee doesn't protest to being quoted without permission. She has been an inspirational figure and role model to us in our first endeavors into online review writing. She is a prolific writer and deserves congratulations for her enormous contribution to the community. read more
