Don Pietro Pizza

Don Pietro is one of my favorite pizza places in this city, and I have two stories to tell of my deep love for the place.

The first is that I did once stay up for around two hours, hoping against all hope that they would deliver a pizza ordered over the phone. Wishful thinking, that, and it resulted in a very sleepy me. To be fair, we had ordered it at about 2 am, and it's questionable whether we were even speaking to anyone working at the restaurant.

The second is that yemeksepeti was down today, so I asked a friend to call in the order for me. Apparently, I eat there enough that they knew my name based off my address.

Today I'm getting the smallest size Pizza Rossa, a delicious pizza with olives, carmelized onions, sundried tomatoes and, best of all, capers. Though it's my favorite, I've also had the Margarita, Ottoman and Toscana pizzas. The smallest pizza is enough for a meal, but just barely. If you're worried at all, better to go with the 32 cm pizzas for a few lira more.

The pizza is fantastic - it's got delicious very thin crust, is cheesy and has tomato sauce on it, spiced well, delicious toppings, the edge is a bit dry, which is nice to eat with the cheese... Overall, amazing. I've heard the desserts are quite good too, though I've not had one myself. Watch out for grease dripping on you, particularly with the Margarita pizzas - care of some seriously delicious cheese!

Sbarro

As far as I can tell or remember, I got a pizza slice delivered to my work for about 10 lira. However, the current menu doesn't seem to feature a single slice, but it's definitely what I got. The below critique applies regardless.

This was literally the worst pizza I have ever had in Istanbul, and possibly my life. It was so gross that I ended up throwing away half the slice and buying different food. It's the pizza equivalent of a gin and coke: so gross, that despite the horrors of wasting the precious, treasured resource, it had to be dumped. The cheese was a horrifying congeled mess and it tasted like eating cardboard. Gross cardboard, like the kind of cardboard that maybe a homeless person or a stray dog would sleep in. I spent ten lira to learn what it would taste like to like a stray dog matted in cheese.

I ate this pizza sometime around May 2011. How could I remember with such great detail, you ask? Because immediately upon tossing the disgusting 'food' item into the trash, I put a warning on facebook for all to heed: do not eat Sbarro pizza. A friend responded with this article from Slate by Justin Peters: "The State of Sbarro: America's Least Essential Restaurant." If you haven't noticed the hyperlink, the article's also called "Sborring." The spot-on review includes such gems as:

When the pizza chain Sbarro filed for bankruptcy in April, analysts speculated on the cause of the restaurant's problems. Industry expert Blair Chancey cited a "perfect storm" of adverse conditions—rising commodity prices, too-rapid growth, increased competition, and a decline in mall traffic. I, however, have a simpler explanation: Nobody likes Sbarro. Devoid of atmosphere, charm, and gustatory relevance, with no signature product to call its own, it's America's least essential restaurant.

Another:

While "it didn't make me feel sick" hardly counts as a ringing endorsement, Sbarro needs to take all the praise that it can get right now.

It doesn't stop there. My favorite quote from the article:

Most of Sbarro's fans seem to come from places like Turkey and the Philippines—honorable countries with little experience in the American pizza tradition. (A typical post: "Merhaba hosgeldiniz sbarroya. Helloo welcome to sbarro. Afyon afium sbarro.")

God, it's true. Sbarro represents the worst of American pizza, and the chain in Turkey represents quite possibly the worst of the worst.

I also got a tiramisu while very hungry in an airport. It was pretty good, I think.

***UPDATE***
The Sbarros at the airport is extremely expensive but also seemed to be quite good, and provides perfect midnight sendoff food!