Campus Pizza
7610-112 St., 434-4414
This isn’t intended as a restaurant review, but more of an appreciation of the hole-in-the-wall neighbourhood pizza joint I’ve been patronizing for more than a decade. Part of the reason it’s not intended as a restaurant review is because Campus Pizza is not necessarily a place you’d want to sit down for a bite—assuming you ever managed to locate its tiny premises in McKernan and actually found them open.
From the outside, it’s hard to tell that Campus Pizza is a going concern. The sheet of paper taped to the window that tells you their operating hours is dated 2003, there are precious few signs of life inside (they don’t open until 4 p.m.) and the décor has remained unchanged in the reach of my memory. The sitting area is cramped and dingy, its sole redeeming attribute a tabletop videogame from the 1980s—I recall it was the antiquated aerial combat game 1942, but the last time I played it was about 12 years ago while I was waiting for a baked Italian loaf.
Since then, all my meals from Campus Pizza have been delivered—there were a few dark years I lived outside their delivery range and I was forced to resort to unseemly mass-produced grease-wheel alternatives, but I’ve more or less resolved to opt for hunger over generic boilerplate pie with an easy-to-remember phone number when the proprietors of Campus aren’t answering the phone.
Campus’ 14-inch house special ($20.50) has become a weekly occurrence in my life, part and parcel of my Wednesday night habit of getting together with friends to play music and quaff a few ones that are cold. While not quite the apotheosis of pizza—a title I’d be willing to bestow on the Rosebowl at the height of its powers—it’s a worthy exemplar of the well-made pie that evinces attention to detail without getting all fussy and weird about it.
Last things first: you can’t order too much Campus Pizza. Better than the actual moment when the pizza sails through your door is the next day when you reheat it in a 400-degree oven for 10 minutes—directly on the oven rack, mind. The dough gets all crispy and the reheated cheese browns, the carpet of sliced deli meats under the cheese releases its oleaginous steam, the senses reel. (If you put it in a microwave, I swear I will hunt you down and make you sorry.) Campus Pizza seems chemically constituted to be even better the next day. That’s a breakfast that sticks to the ribs.
Fresh out of the box, though, Campus is still pretty good straight-up pizza. They cut their 14-inchers into squares, leaving crunchy little hors d’oeuvres triangles of crust and cheese at the corners that are among my favourite pieces. The Campus crust is substantial but never doughy, with an apposite seam of tangy-yet-unobtrusive tomato sauce under the toppings.
The house special, my perennial order, features ham and pepperoni, black olives, onions, green peppers, shrimp, and a spare strewing of pineapple chunks. That particular configuration under a judicious—not suffocating—blanket of mozzarella with fresh ground pepper, crushed chilis and Louisiana hot sauce tastes like the only pizza I’ll ever need, at least while I’m eating it, and then again the next morning when I eat it again. It certainly renders irrelevant all the 2-for-1, stuffed-crust, petroleum-based-dipping-sauce cartoon pizzas rolling off assembly lines across the city.
Long live the one-off neighbourhood hole-in-the-wall pizza joint. And long live tabletop 1942.
