my domino's experience
since the former domino's CEO took over as michigan's athletic director, i felt like it was my duty as a michigan man to taste the new and improved pizza product that our new AD came up with.
because i live in the 21st century, i ordered the pizza online, which was pretty cool. there were lots of options for extra/less/regular amounts of cheese/toppings and such. you can also specify what toppings you want by the half pizza, ie half with toppings A and B and the other half with toppings C and D. there's even an animated picture of the pizza which allows you to visualize exactly what you are getting.
i opted for the 2 medium 2 toppings deal and put in a somewhat complicated order of 2 different toppings on each half for both pizzas, effectively creating 4 different topping combinations. after i submitted in my order, the website told me that ferdando had taken my order and then included a link to a pizza tracking page. the pizza tracking page allowed me to track in real time what was happening to my pizzas. the different stages were:
order placed -> prep -> bake -> box -> delivery/pickup
tracking the pizza's progress heightened the anticipation much like tracking the delivery of an online order through UPS.
after receiving my pizza, i came to the conclusion that ferdando wasn't exactly the most competent of pizza makers, as both pizzas were screwed up. one was missing an entire topping from one half (ordered halves of A+B & C+D, but received A+B & C). the other pizza was even more messed up (ordered halves of X+Y & X+Z, but received X & Y+Z).
as for the taste, i think it definitely was better than the old domino's recipe. the cheese seemed like a step up, becoming "acceptable" and was no longer of the plastic variety of cheese. i don't really recall much about the sauce, though one can hardly go wrong there. the crust was a huge improvement over the bland nothingness of the old domino's recipe. the hand tossed crust was flavored with butter and garlic and even reminded me of papa john's garlic butter dipping sauce. you're not going to get quite the same experience as you would with dipping your crust into buttery goodness, but there were definitely a few times i almost thought i was eating a papa john's crust dipped in their garlic butter sauce.
overall, i thought the taste of domino's has become adequate and i probably won't object to the suggestion of domino's like i might have in the past. in terms of national pizza chains, papa john's still leads the way, with domino's and pizza hut in the second tier and little caesars bringing up the rear. if this is any indication of where michigan athletics is headed, we should soon be competing for big ten titles in football, occasionally making the NCAA tournament in basketball, and winning the NC in hockey. i hope!