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A decade later, when national franchise operations like Pizza Hut were turning the lowly Neapolitan flatbread into a complete dinner that could be delivered hot and gooey with melted mozzarella, my father shrugged in amazement and said, "Who would have thought pizza could become big business?"
Not just big business, but one that turned a peasant dish into something with more incarnations than Madonna: thin crust, deep dish, stuffed, grilled, rolled, on-a-stick, New York-style or Chicago-style or the obscenely greasy squares that became a staple of American high school cafeterias.
I was recently in Rome, where I saw pizza (and Diet Coke, Marlboro cigarettes and Snickers bars) everywhere. At one neighborhood pizzeria, behind a glass counter, a dozen or so pizza choices were topped with ingredients as varied as julienned potatoes and ham or ground sausage and canned pineapple or fresh tomato, mozzarella and basil or hunks of roasted squash. I found them to be no better or worse than anything I've tasted in any American food court.
But pizza, I've learned, is just pizza, whether it's on Rome's Quattro Cantoni or Overland Park's Reeder Road. Sure, things have grown more complex since the basic cheese pizza my parents ate 44 years ago, but have they really gotten better?
I wondered about that after sampling the "award-winning" pies at the four-month-old Green Mill Restaurant and Bar in the Holiday Inn off 87th Street and I-35. It's the newest installment for a Minneapolis-based chain, and at first glance the place wouldn't seem to have much going for it. Visually it's absolutely dreary. Despite the tiled floor near the smoky bar and the reproductions of vintage French advertising posters hung on the walls, it looks like any suburban hotel dining room. The menu, however, is more elaborate than a typical hotel restaurant's, with pizza as its claim to fame. Green Mill's kitchen hand-tosses pies in deep-dish, thin-crust or double-crust versions and loads them up with lots of cheese. (There's a decent selection of pasta dishes, steaks, fish dinners, burgers and salads as well.)
I first learned of the restaurant from a reader's letter extolling the pizza as the best she had ever eaten. I was especially intrigued because the restaurant's name -- The Green Mill -- hardly evoked images of Italian cuisine. But the name predates the menu: The original Green Mill Inn started as a Depression-era soda fountain in St. Paul, Minnesota; pizza didn't bow on the menu until years later.
So I dragged along the fussiest pizza critics I know, my two goddaughters -- ages nine and twelve -- who are passionate about the dish. We were escorted from the hotel entrance through the bar into a dining room with only one other occupied table. The girls got kiddie menus (the placemat-as-coloring-book variety) and three crayons each, and our host handed me the vinyl-covered adult version. A few minutes later the grim-faced young server made the first of her brief, erratic appearances to take our order. After that she was practically a phantom, materializing only to deliver plates of food. If we asked for anything (a straw, for example), she simply vanished until we finally stopped waiting for whatever it was we had requested. (Even getting a check proved to be an ordeal.)
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