Mr. Pizza

The department has had an additional American visitor for the past couple of weeks. Nice fellow and more outgoing than me. He took me and four of the graduate students out to Mr. Pizza yesterday. Mr. Pizza is a Korean pizza chain. I am not sure whether I have blogged yet about this strange stuff that Koreans call "pizza." It is circular and flat with crust and cheese and toppings, so it looks like what one knows as pizza. In fact, one gets the impression that perhaps someone had seen a photograph of pizza and then experimented until they came up with something they liked. Of course what I am hinting at is that the strongest similarity is the visual one. The cheese, for example, is typically not mozzarella. It might be a mixture of some soft, kind of sweet cheese in the middle and then cheddar in a ring around the outside giving the visual impression of this ring of crust around the outside of a western pizza. Toppings included corn, corn chips, potato wedges, bacon, and shrimp. One of the pizzas was drizzled with something I think was ranch dressing. The ring of cheddar-cheese pseudocrust was stuffed with sweet potato. I don't believe that either involved tomato sauce. Actually, it's quite good stuff, but it is as dis- similar to western pizza as it possibly could be while still preserving the visual resemblance.