As I pulled into Eureka from my Los Angeles trip "Sweet Home Alabama" was playing on the radio. Appropriate. (On an unrelated note, on that same night The Devil's Rejects played on IFC.) I wasn't heading home, though. I desperately wanted to be home, but I had a different destination in mind. Big Pete's.
If you ever lived on the East Coast, you know how sacrosanct pizza is. There are pizza joints every three and a half feet, and you can get your grub by the slice. Moving out to Humboldt, however, left me with culture shock. Very few pizza places, and even fewer where you could purchase by the slice. Arcata, however, had Live From New York, which is great, and then eventually got Big Pete's, which is also great and has a friendlier staff to boot. For a while, though, it was only in Arcata.
I hate Arcata. I rarely go there, and when I did it was usually to get pizza from Big Pete's. When gas prices skyrocketed and a divorce cut my income, I had to stop going there as much.
Then the Pizza Hut here in town closed, and Big Pete's moved in, opening the day I returned. Sweet God, I was in Heaven. I was also the Eureka location's first repeat customer. (I have gone there three times in the first two days, and will be heading there for dinner in about a half hour.)
East Coast style pizza (and you can Californicate it up if you feel the need to do such a strange thing with things like chicken and walnuts, which makes the East Coast in my cringe). Normally that would be enough to get my praise, but there are these large-screen televisions playing, and today the place had a soccer match on. Heaven times two. Then I noticed that some of the beer signs were soccer-based as well. Someone at Big Pete's is a soccer fan.
East Coast pizza by the slice? Soccer? That is, quite simply, orgasmic.
Go check it out at 1709 5th St. Beer will be served as soon as the license passes.
Eureka just got better.
No comments:
Post a Comment