You might remember a 2004 documentary called Supersize Me in which writer-producer Morgan Spurlock explored the consequences on his health of a diet consisting solely of McDonald’s food for one month. Spurlock has nothing on Dan Janssen who as of 2019 had eaten almost nothing but pizza for nearly thirty years. That’s pizza for lunch and dinner every day of the year for just about three decades. Janssen is certainly no believer in the old adage that variety is the spice of life because the only spice with which he tops his pizza is oregano. Nor does variety extend to the type of pizza he enjoys. Every day he usually consumes one fourteen-inch cheese pizza for lunch and another for dinner.
Any dietary diversity he enjoys is through eating at different pizza restaurants–even chains, about which he declares “they’re all pretty bad, but I do frequent them. Pizza is like sex—even when it’s bad, it’s good.” Ironically, as a teenager Janssen became a vegetarian for “ethical reasons” but determined rather quickly that he didn’t like vegetables. A pizza diet seemed to make sense. Just as a diet of nothing but McDonald’s food for a month wreaked havoc on Morgan Spurlock’s health, Janssen’s pizza diet has given him diabetes and created low blood sugar issues.
In terms of pizza consumption, Dan Janssen is…well above average (putting it mildly). The average American eats an average of 46 slices of pizza per year, amounting to 23 pounds of pizza per year. Over a lifetime, the average American will eat 6,000 slices of pizza–or about what it would take Janssen just over a year to polish off. Janssen came to mind on our trip home as we were transporting our first-ever pizza from the aptly named Slice & Dice in far northwest Albuquerque. The aromas emanating from the backseat were driving me crazy…as in needing windshield wipers inside my truck cab crazy…as in Carly Simon “anticipation is makin me wait” crazy. Not only did those aromas make me behave like one of Pavlov’s dogs, it made me envious of Dan Janssen. Right then and there–even before tasting it–I swore I could eat 6,000 slices of Slice & Dice pizza. My truck had the alluring aroma of a fresh pizza just extricated from a high heat oven.
Slice & Dice has been making guests behave like Pavlov’s dogs since it launched in August, 2018. We envied guests who were fortunate enough to eat at the restaurant. They were able to quickly confirm what the enticing aromas were telling them–that Slice & Dice bakes one heckuva pizza. We, on-the-other-hand, had to transport our fourteen-inch pie 10.3 miles, a 25-minute excursion at posted speed limits. It was akin to being inches away from riches untold but not being able to grasp them. Why, we wondered, didn’t we move closer to this burgeoning quadrant of the city where other restaurants such as M’Tucci’s Moderno would be within walking distance.
Slice & Dice may be relatively new to the Duke City metropolitan area, but it’s got a pizza pie pedigree that goes back almost as long as the distance home felt. Owner Vic Briseno was raised in the family pizzeria, the Surf Shack in Grants, New Mexico, which, according to its website, “has been making killer pizza for 15 years.” The restaurant’s pedigree is subtitled “Board Game Pizzeria,” a homage to Vic Briseno’s other passion. Slice & Dice provides an extensive board game library that guests can choose from to enjoy while dining on family recipes.
There’s more than pizza on the menu though Dan Janssen would never get that far in reading the menu. He’d never, for example, notice that there are four sub-sandwiches on the menu as well as six specialty subs. Nor would Janssen even consider any of the four appetizers, not even the stuffed mushrooms (baked mushrooms with Italian sausage, onion, bell pepper and cream cheese topped with Parmesan). Thank goodness my Kim and I aren’t on an exclusive pizza diet. The stuffed mushrooms, six per order, are terrific. Each teacup sized mushroom cap will give you two- to three-bites of juiciness and flavor. In some ways, it’s like pizza within a mushroom with the added surprise twist of cream cheese.
We had barely set food into our home before attacking our pizza, the aptly named Full House (pepperoni, sausage, beef, mushrooms, onions and black olives). Anticipation may have made us wait, but that wait was rewarded with a pizza as good as the aromas had announced. The canvas for this circular masterpiece was a chewy “pan-style crust” about halfway between thin and thick. The meats are sheathed under a molten blanket of melting cheese with mushrooms and black olives on top. It’s a convergence of ingredients that really work well together. Contrary to my initial impressions, we couldn’t finish off but two slices each–a good thing it turns out because breakfast pizza is as good as lunch and dinner pizza. This is a pizza which earns its name of Full House.
It’s not likely we’ll ever adopt a diet as singularly focused as Dan Janssen, however, restaurants such as Slice & Dice are able to put that notion into our minds. That’s saying a lot.
Slice & Dice
5720 McMahon Blvd., N.W., Suite B
Albuquerque, New Mexico
(505) 361-2058
Website | Facebook Page
LATEST VISIT: 4 April 2020
# OF VISITS: 1
RATING: N/R
COST: $$
BEST BET: Stuffed Mushrooms, The Full House
REVIEW #1155
Hi Bob: I’m with Gil – I love anchovies – straight out of the can / jar and on Caesar salads but definitely not on pizza.
Becky, anchovies in a Caesar salad works for me but not on pizza. In fact, I’m not a fan of seafood pizzas. Nor any fruit pizzas such as pineapple. But I can take any version of cow, pig, even buffalo on pizza. Having said that, the one seafood pizza exception is clams. I don’t know why, but clams work for me. You?
Hi Tom: I’m with you on any kind of seafood or fruit pizza – I even have a hard time wrapping my head around clam pizza. After frequenting raw clam bars for years, I developed a strange and inexplicable aversion to clams a while ago – with the exception of Clams Casino. Go figure. I guess I’m firmly stuck in the 1960s – my very favorite pizza is double cheese and double cup and char pepperoni. I see Gil posted about the clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s which is probably the best there is.
Aaah the marvelous complexity of the brain is unimaginable, let alone imagining its evolutionary creation is almost as complex to imagine. How the integration of thingies named taste buds…having too little of this one, too many of that one; coupled with smell; the visual aspects of a morsel and its texture; all intermingle with different parts of the brain while adding in memories of past experiences. Anchovies from the can? I’ve done it and enjoyed it, but can’t do it at the moment! Clams on a pizza…now THAT is sick! The only good clam is a Fried Strip Clam (sans belly) and atop a slice would be absurd!!! LOL
So is this pizza any good or not?
Absolutely, though the ideal situation is to eat it at the restaurant or drive to a park very close by. It took us 25 minutes to get it home.
The “Full House” appears to be born from the manger of Colorado’s “mountain pies-style” – one giant ring of glorious, doughy crust with supersized toppings. Unless a pizzeria owner hails from another part of the country other than New Mexico it seems this mountain style is the coin of the realm in the Land of Enchantment.
I grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula, and other than the chains (Round Table being my favorite), the ’80s ushered in a “West Coast-style” – wood-fired, thin-crust pizza, topped with the bounty of the land. Most impactful to the West Coast style was Austrian-American chef Wolfgang Puck, who opened his Beverly Hills restaurant, Spago, in 1982, modernizing pizza as much as Stravinsky modernized music.
Even though I do not self-identify with being Catholic my tastes are catholic when it comes to all styles of pizza. Albeit, I suppose everyone has a particular topping he or she fundamentally abhors. Pineapple, comes to mind. Anchovies. I even knew someone who liked bananas on pizza. My nettling topping is pepperoni.
Even when handled with a deft culinary touch, at best, pepperoni is the least attractive entrant in a pizzeria beauty pageant featuring salami, sausage or bacon. At worse (and it usual is cooked this way) pepperoni is a rubber-hard substitute for hiking boot inserts.
Slice & Dice sounds nice.
Hi Tom:
I do agree that “Slice and Dice sounds nice”.
And I’m one of those people who absolutely abhors pineapple or anchovies on my pizza. BUT – and I know Gil got a good laugh when he read your post, knowing full well that I’d leap to the defense of my favorite pizza topping – I just don’t think you’ve had great pepperoni. For that you’d have to go to Buffalo, NY for cup and char pepperoni – the best brands are Margherita and Battistoni, both manufactured in that city. When I lived in California and Arizona, any visitor from Western New York State was required to bring me a very generous supply.
Rather than droning on and on, let me refer you to the following link which you might find of interest: https://blog.slicelife.com/should-cup-and-char-roni-be-called-buffalo-style/.
And be sure and check out the pepperoni porn on: http://www.sexyslices.com/.
Buffalo pepperoni is delicious – and that’s no baloney!
Thank you, Becky. If you hadn’t come to the defense of pepperoni, I would have.
Tom, when you return to the Land of Enchantment, your first peregrination should be to Forghedaboudit in Deming, New Mexico. Not only will Bob Yacone and his beautiful family treat you like royalty, they’ll introduce you to one of only four life-altering pizzas I’ve ever had–a pizza with a pedigree at the highest echelon of pizza competition. In 2017 at the International Pizza Expo, the largest gathering of pizza professionals in the world, Forghedaboudit’s sausage and cup-and-char pepperoni pizza was selected as “Best Traditional Pizza” in the Southwest. It also placed second in the United States and fourth in the world in the traditional pizza category. Until Bob and Kim prepared one of their award-winning pies for me, pepperoni was a “take it or leave it” ingredient for me. Cup-and-char pepperoni changed all that.
A couple years after our visit to Forghedaboudit, my dear friend Becky sent me a bag of Margherita pepperoni for my birthday. Unfortunately, relatives were visiting at the time and one we’ll call “Mussolini” devoured more than her share. Suffice to say, next time she visits we’ll hide the pepperoni and leave out the Oscar Mayer baloney.
“Cup-and-Char” pepperoni I had not heard of. I shall like to try a pizza with “cup-and-char” pepperoni. If for no other reason than to dispel my ingrained impression that “great pepperoni” is an oxymoron.
Gil, I can take a hint when I see one! I’m already working on your birthday package for this year. Hopefully, Mussolini won’t show up. Maybe I’d better send a triple batch just in case….
By the way, you forgot to mention that Bob from Forghedaboudit is from the Buffalo area. It’s no accident that he knows about cup and char and New Mexico certainly is the beneficiary.
Becky, is it true “pepperoni pizza” doesn’t exist in Italy?
This from a post on Quora:
“In Italy we can find in pizzerias, in bakeries or in street food stands something similar to what in the United States is known as ‘pepperoni pizza’, but we never would call it that.
“The simple reason is that pepperoni in Italian means: ‘bell peppers’ (while we call chili pepper peperoncino, which would be ‘small pepper’). We use bell peppers in various recipes, such as sauces for pasta, or ratatouille-like dishes such as the peperonata or la vecchia, but we would never put them on a pizza as a main ingredient because, frankly, it would suck. At most, you can find some grilled bell pepper in a pizza alle verdure or pizza vegetariana (among other grilled vegetables such as zucchini and eggplants).
“So, if you go in a pizzeria in Italy and ask for a pizza al pepperoni they will look you as if you’re insane.
“The exact moment in which a spicy cured pork meat began to be called pepperoni (probably because of the chili pepper involved) is not clear. I guess it is a term born in the Italian-American community, because it’s completely undecipherable in all of Italy.
“What Americans call pepperoni pizza we call pizza al salamino piccante (literally: spicy salami pizza) or, more often, pizza alla diavola. You can also order pizza with prosciutto, hungarian style salami, or wurstel sausages.”
Tom, yes, sadly it’s true. It’s a form of salami and an Italian-American “invention”.
Absolutely, though the ideal situation is to eat it at the restaurant or drive to a park very close by. It took us 25 minutes to get it home.
Yo Gil…there seems to be a hitch in yer git-a-long in terms of where this, 6/22, Comment landed under Becky’s 4/8 Comment. Anyway, somehow I missed the first addition of Slice and Dice. Scanning through and the Comments, I noted Becky’s negativity RE Pineapple AND Anchovies! While I can agree RE the Pineapple, I was saddened to read of the Anchovies. While I would agree to a “No!” for whole Anchovies as a topping, I indeed find a pizza place is especial if it has an option for DICED anchovies topping a pie judiciously…Eh, I don’t recall anyone ever saying they don’t like that Mexican salad known as Caesar’s!? Indeed, a pizza without Pepperoni…and green chile…is not a pizza . It would be like a Harvey Wallbanger without Galliano! Add shrooms or bell peppers and it’s fine…well, an egg wash on the cornicione would be a nice touch. If truth be told, I would not ignore an old version of Pizza Hut’s Personal Pan Pizza Supreme (with Green).
Viva La Anchovy!
Que estrano! Thanks for pointing out the error of my ways. I’ve fixed the SNAFU.
Thanks for coming to the defense of anchovies. I love them, especially white anchovies, on Caesar salads. On pizza, not quite as much.