Ha-ha! These are serious questions that we ask in 2012. Whenever a fast food empire releases a new meal item, despite our initial revulsion at seeing that it looks like something a dog coughed up and then spread on bread, or put in a taco shell, or slapped between two fried pieces of chicken, some insane part of us wonders, if even fleetingly, “What the hell could THAT taste like?” We wonder this as our minds conjure every variation of awful pseudo-food we’ve ever microwaved and eaten in college.
This Pizzabon doesn’t look to be any different. In fact it looks like something that has the words bagel bite and/or Chef Boyardee attached. Both are things you’d never hope to encounter again in your adult life. So, since the announcement of this new food item hit the media earlier this week, has anyone been able to sample a Pizzabon in order to validate our fears? Yes!
Wyatt Williams of AtlantaMagazine.com was able to score one of these things and his response is priceless.
Here’s the first surprise: the Pizzabon actually looks better in person than it does in the promotional photo that has been floating around the internet. It looks less like a radioactive Twinkie with melted plastic on top and more like a leaning spiral of dough, meat, and cheese that has been lightly browned on top. Just one bite and I found myself in the grips of distinct flavor memory: the Pizza Hut buffet of my childhood. Each element of this is distinct: pepperoni like a leathery strip of salt-fat, cheese that has more in common with solidified grease than a dairy product, and tomato sauce that bears little resemblance to the flavor of any tomato I’ve ever met. Those who have tasted a Cinnabon cinnamon roll or tried to eat a pillow will recognize the softness of the dough.
For another perspective, how about blogger Todd Brock from SeriousEats.com?
Like most of you, I was worried that a Cinnabon-made pizza snack would somehow join traditional pizza toppings and flavors (yay!) with the chain’s famously ooey-gooey-drippingly-sweet rolls (hell, yes!) to produce a pizza infused with cinnamon-sugar goo (ewwww). Thankfully, saner heads prevailed at the Cinnabon test kitchen. While I certainly didn’t expect to find any char or leopard spotting, I was surprised at how much cheese and grease was soaking the bottoms of these buns. Cooked Pizzabons wait under the sneeze guard in a tray that holds a dozen at a time. As they sit, that cheese is melting… that pepperoni is oozing grease… and it’s got nowhere to go but straight down the sides of the dough until it all pools around the bottom. This made the Pizzabon pretty greasy, but overall, it actually wasn’t terrible. It’s very doughy?exponentially doughier than even your deepest deep-dish pie. It reminded me of those homemade pizza treats that Mom cobbled together with a tube of refrigerated dough and a jar of sauce when you had a sleepover.
Hilariously he ends with:
I never DIDN’T go to Cinnabon because they didn’t offer a savory snack version that tasted like a pizza. I’d never get a Pizzabon AND a Cinnabon together (just typing that made me bloated and sleepy)… and I certainly wouldn’t do the walk of shame up to a Cinnabon without getting the syrupy-sweet version (because I’m a weak, weak man)… so I’m not sure when or why I would seek out a Pizzabon again.
And that’s probably the bigger point. There is probably never a reason why one would seek out the Pizzabon, had it not been invented. Williams deftly named this newest wave of “gross out fast food,” the Stunt Sandwich. And his analysis is spot on. It’s not that the corporate bigwigs don’t know that these food items are offensive, they know. However, what they’re betting on is that despite that fact, they’ll tap into some pleasure center we Americans have that covets greasy, cheesy, saucy, melty, sandwichy-ness, and we will be powerless to refuse the allure of something that contains not one but every nuance in the same meal. And this may be the most dastardly thing of all. Corporate food sellers know this shit is manically unhealthy, insanely unappetizing, but yet and still, even if based on novelty alone, they know we will buy it just to say that we’ve tried it — not to say that it was good — but to be able to say that it either defied expectation, or was so much worse than we ever could have imagined.
The concept is practically yelling, “You remember how gross and unhealthy and environmentally unsustainable fast food is? Well, this is, like, TWICE as gross as that. Come eat it.” The Pizzabon asks the consumer to acknowledge the unappetizing absurdity of fast food while participating in it.
It is the epitome of, “If you build it, they will come….and eat it all.”
But if you just have to know for yourself, only the Cumberland Mall on Atlanta’s northwest side serves the Pizzabon for now. And this Saturday, (August 18, 2012), they’re free from 11am to 2pm.
(Seriously though, if you really want something similar without the strip mall gorge-o-rama treatment and you’re in the NYC area, go to Original Supreme’s Pizza in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, and get the pepperoni garlic knots. Fabulously homemade. Max two in one sitting.)
