Just recently I was relaxing and watching the boob tube, when I saw the new Domino’s Pizza ad. At first I wasn’t sure what was going on. As I recall, a fellow standing in a professional kitchen (possibly the CEO) was saying that customers had told the Domino’s management that their pizza wasn’t good. The language he quoted was pretty blunt. Wow. He went on to say that they had taken this to heart and changed their recipes (and possibly the ingredients?). Finally, he asked the viewer to please come in and try the new pizza. It was hard to believe that this was an ad, with simple candor. What a concept – no slick sales pitch, and even more amazing, an admission of error by a corporate boss. Unbelievable! And refreshing. Finally somebody who gets it. Now that I think about it, I wonder if it’s cheaper to make this type of ad than some dazzling, slick, completely phony production.
In the Internet age, with everyone blogging and commenting everywhere, and with news organizations publishing online countless times per day, it’s very hard for a huge business to hide. If your stuff sucks, people will find out very quickly, whether or not you admit it. As such, corporate heads can no longer count on preventing negative press from being seen, which they were able to do when distribution of news and information was very tightly controlled. But it’s still the rare CEO who seems to grasp this. I suppose that if upper management has been there a long time, and no longer is in touch with rapid changes that make up our modern reality, then you’ll still see the tired, outmoded ad techniques trickling down from their remote ivory tower. Fortunately, this seems to be changing.
Compare Domino’s approach to the lame “management by press release” that we see from the hilariously inept NBC executives Dick Ebersol and Jeff Zucker. I laugh as I read their frantic spinning of their own failed idea of moving Jay Leno to an earlier time slot, and the even stupider idea of trying to move him back to the old time slot now. Classic top-down outmoded management. Accept no responsibility for failure, blame it all on the staff, frantically churn your offerings, and hope the derision and bad ratings will just go away so the minting of money can proceed as it used to. No wonder the big networks are having so much trouble.
Last night we suddenly thought, hey, we need dinner, let’s go for it! Lonnie ordered through the Domino’s website, we picked it up, and I’ll have to say, it was very good! MUCH better than the old stuff. It wasn’t a flawless performance, there were some glitches in the ordering, but I liked it, especially the thin-crust stuff, which we demolished very quickly.
We are not usually keen on chain restaurants for a variety of reasons, but we want to reward companies that are making a real effort to do things the right way. Taste in pizza is very personal. People don’t even agree on the definition of a pizza. If you want to start a fight, just get New York and Chicago guys in the same room and ask them to explain what good pizza is. And it’s always amazing, but inevitable that some will like the “pre-improved” product, awful or or not. I look forward to hearing more reviews. Domino’s deserves a lot of credit for moving their company in the right direction.
I don’t think I’ve actually ever had Domino’s pizza. It just so happened that I never grew up near one. At home when I was a kid, we had Pepi’s Pizza, which I disliked. In college, there was Dorian’s, which might be my favorite of all time. I’ve recently moved to the N. Syracuse/Liverpool area and I don’t really know of a good pizza place. There’s Little Caesar’s, but I consider that about one step up from a Hot Pocket. Where do I go for good pizza? Help me, Obi Chu, you’re my only hope!
By the way, I thought you would appreciate something I wrote up a while back when I tried a new pizza place. Three unacceptable pizzeria offenses:
1. Serving wings in tens instead of dozens.
2. Serving wings with ranch dressing instead of bleu cheese.
3. Cutting pizzas into squares or rectangles instead of triangle slices.
I will not stand for any of these abominations. A 4th could be added, “Not accepting credit cards”, but that’s just a commen sense thing.
Jim!
Good to hear from you, as always. Obviously I love pizza – as a guy, it’s almost a genetic certainty. Despite Lonnie and I being all-knowing about food (yeah, right), I think I’ll need to defer to you on this topic – you have made more actual pizza-tastings than I have, and amazingly, you may like pizza better than I do. As a gourmand, my range of pizza acceptability is wider than most.
So I would question whether the new Domino’s pizza would ring your bell. To get the stuff you’re looking for, I’m wondering if a trip to New York is required. Find one of those places with the enormous oven that can easily get much hotter than a home oven, then you have the fairly simple but flawless ingredients, combined well, and then the whole thing cooks on that super oven in just a couple minutes.
You can get something like what’s in this post,
http://chusonchow.com/2009/01/phalanx-of-philly-food-fun/
…although that was in Philly – I didn’t get pizza on my last NY visit.
My NY relatives swear by Lombardi’s in Soho, but I’ve not been there yet:
http://www.firstpizza.com/
Oh, and nearer to here, I should add that we had some great pizza at Tony D’s in Rochester in the rapidly gentrifying Corn Hill area. This is somewhat upscale, big fancy pizza oven, fun and boisterous, I’d say it’s a nice place to take a date.