Today I ordered a pizza for lunch. It was a Chicken and Chorizo pizza and the menu mentioned that it also included onion, mushrooms, cheese and BBQ sauce. Mushrooms? Hmm, no worries I can deal with that, but I thought I’d ask if they could make it for me without the mushrooms - I don’t like mushrooms, and it would be much easier than picking them all off later on.
“I can ask them to, but I can’t guarantee that they will…”
After a really long wait - perhaps we should have pre-ordered - the pizza turned up and it looked pretty good and didn’t smell too bad either…
“Sorry, they couldn’t do it without the mushrooms…”
Really? REALLY? This is a freshly made pizza that I’ve waited an hour for you to make and cook, and you couldn’t leave out an ingredient? It’s not like it was a complex request. Pretty simple really, when you get to the step in the process where you cover the pizza in mushrooms you just don’t. Easy.
What if I had made the original request because I was allergic to mushrooms? Would I then have had to sit and wait for another hour while they made me something else? And it seemed like there were hundreds (I’m prone to exaggeration) of mushrooms too - the mushroom to chicken ratio was WAY out of balance - it was almost like they’d seen the request for NO mushrooms and thought…
“Fuck him, he can have double mushrooms.”
Whatever, I ate my pizza, picking the mushrooms off as I went collecting them in a big pile. And to be fair it was a decent pizza and if not for the unwanted fungus and their inability to tweak it contents I’d probably order it again. Perhaps that’s why I usually just order fish and chips where-ever I go…
In the end my rule is simple. Fungus is for growing on feet, and not on my food.
Finally someone else who dislikes mushrooms as much as me. I find them bland, tasteless and hence I will usually pick them out or ask for no mushrooms. But like you have experienced some people find it too difficult a task to do. Unfortunately I am also vegetarian so I am haunted by mushrooms more so than others *sigh*.
Dean, I had the same issue with Isobar last year. I was told (by a staff member!) that the pizzas are pre-made - the chef goes to the trouble of pulling them out of the freezer and defrosting them. Your request for no mushrooms would probably need to have been routed through some distant pizza-making sweatshop months ago.
I guess that’s not really surprising. But if they are pre-made then the one hour wait seems even worse.
I would have taken the collected mushrooms back and asked if you could return them for cash value. Awesome story though, I hate mushrooms as well.
That is correct. And you should really get that cough looked at…
*cough* I believe it was Isobar, was it not?
Name and shame.
I hate it when they mess up my pizza, i actually dont like the sauce and some places are quite good but sometimes the cook is a gobshite and puts it on anyway.
You should have mailed the mushrooms back.