Regional Pizza Showdown: Iowa's Taco Pizza vs. Colorado-Style Mountain Pie
Two novel styles of pizza. Let's make them fight because journalism is dead.
Heyo!
I just finished up a cross country road trip from Los Angeles to Pennsylvania, and I feel insane. This acute deranged feeling isn’t only because I was living inside of my 2009 Toyota Tacoma for nearly 40 hours, eating Gardetto’s garlic rye chips and Old Trapper beef jerky while listening to the same two Blues Traveler songs over and over again in what will forever be known as my manic truck state. It’s also because I’m home. Home is restorative—a meaningful place to reconnect with one’s self through family, through the land, through the past. But, it can also cause a person to become dizzy with panic. Like, what exactly am I doing here?
New Castle, the small, worn out Rust Belt town where I’m from, is going to be home base this Summer as I travel around and write for the next few months. For the foreseeable future, I’m a digital vagabond writing for media outlets based in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Chicago, and more. My brother also opened a vegan restaurant in Pittsburgh called Sia’s, so I’m there to help out and occasionally peddle my briefcase full of pasta wares on Sundays. If you live in Pittsburgh, follow me on Instagram for updates on that.
Things are busy, my life feels full, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to share all of my food thoughts and fine dining-findings with all of you here at The Move.
Real quick, slick: Before we begin, please subscribe! Tell your friends, too. If they like down-to-earth food writing (I was once described as working class by an LAT employee), hot restaurant tips, and entertaining musings about sandwiches, this newsletter is for them.
The Perils of Eating in a Hotel Room
Before we get into the atrocities of regional pizza, I have to divulge a quick, hilarious anecdote as told to me by friend and comedian Zak Toscani, who was performing at The Comedy Fort in Fort Collins, Colorado.
I had a blast catching up with Zak. He’s an incredible storyteller both on and off stage. You know what I really love about Zak’s comedy? He’s pleasant to listen to. Zak isn’t one of these comedians frantically screaming all the time. He just very calmly tells jokes, and I think that stands out amid the panicky, roast-driven, crowd work-centric style of stand-up comedy today. Plus there’s a familial quality to most of his material, and a gentleness, too. Anyway, he confided to me that he was recently in Houston, where he ate crawfish pho out of his hotel room ice bucket.
To-go pho is always troublesome. But, crawfish pho? Like, the Vietnamese-Cajun crossover? In a hotel? Ripping the heads off freshwater crustaceans and sucking their brains out like a hobo zombie in a Motel 6? Absolutely insane.
Or is it?
The problem with take out pho is that it simply doesn’t fit into most bowls you have at home. You need something capacious to dump all of that soup accoutrement into. Hotels, specifically the ones that comedians frequent, famously don’t have accoutrement. They have funeral smells, guys with knives, and weary bagels. All hotels do have ice buckets, though, and I won’t ever be able to look at them the same way again.
Ice bucket pho. Sure it kind of looks like he’s eating out of a trash can, but check out all that room. Room for corn, crawfish, potatoes, andouille sausage, bean sprouts, herbs, and all that delicious broth. The hotel ice bucket is a perfect vessel to contain pho. But, don’t take it to me, read what Zak had to say when I reached out for additional comment:
“Ok, well pho places don’t provide a bowl and a hotel certainly didn’t have it. There is of course the container full of broth, but where do you displace the broth when adding all the noodles, meat, and veggies? So I looked in the room and the ice bucket was like a eureka moment. Perfect size, has a liner, insulated. It was kind of fucking made to be a pho container.”
Genius. Also, can you imagine what the cleaning staff thought?
On to the pizza…
OK Danny, what in the Rocky Mountain fuck is Colorado-style pizza?
In all my years eating and researching pizza, I’ve never heard of Colorado-style. And after tasting it, I don’t think it’ll be catching on anytime soon.
Credit to this style of pizza goes completely to Beau Jo’s, a pizza chain with six locations in Colorado. In addition to pizza, they also serve a lot of calzones, pasta, salads, and garlic bread. Pretty standard stuff. But what is their self-described mountain pie, exactly? To my understanding, the unusual style is a thick, topping heavy pizza with a hand-braided crust meant to resemble the Rocky Mountains. Oh, and it’s also served with honey. Per Beau Jo’s website,
Our Mountain pie has a hand-rolled edge of daily made dough creating a barrier to hold in a mountain full of fresh toppings, to satisfy an adventurous appetite. Our Mountain pie sizes comes in pounds, 1#, 2#, 2# and 5#. The crust offers a built-in dessert to be dipped in honey. We recommend a pound per hungry person when ordering sizes. Our prairie pie does not have a hand rolled edge and has a lighter amount of premium toppings. The prairie pie comes in small, medium, large and extra-large sizes. The pizzas complement the different types of terrain here in Colorado from the mountains to the prairies.
So, the pizza is meant to mirror the gorgeous Colorado landscape. I can’t say that I’ve ever had pizza that recreates regional topography before. But, maybe tavern-style pizza does accurately capture the flatness of the Midwest, and maybe California pizza does somewhat illustrate the colorful West Coast terrain. Still, those pizzas weren’t directly created to mimic the homeland. On paper, Colorado-style pizza feels kind of forced. It’s a shoehorned idea. It screams “We have our own style of pizza around here!” like a toddler wanting attention from adults at a party. Ok, that’s probably too harsh. How does it taste?
Well, pretty fucking bad.
I ordered a pizza with sausage, pepperoncini, and bell peppers, but the toppings just couldn’t mask the fact that just entirely too much dough here. It’s thick, bread-y, and bland. All of that crust and almost no flavor. I’d rather eat the mountains themselves.
Even more peculiar is that at Beau Jo’s, in addition to packets of parmesan cheese and chili flakes, they also give you little packets of Kraft honey. The honey, I am told, is an integral part of the mountain pie experience. Rip open some honey and squeeze it onto each slice of pizza—seems like a great idea, but the honey is of such low quality.
If you find yourself in the unfortunate situation of consuming a Colorado-style pizza, I suggest combining a copious amount of chili flakes and the Kraft honey together. You’ll end up with something that vaguely resembles hot honey, which is a good idea to use on pizza, but I ask, why not just drizzle your pizzas with Mike’s Hot Honey, Beau Jo’s?
This pizza is a bad idea and there’s somehow six locations serving it. That should be inspiring to you, reader. Sky’s the limit! Reach for the stars! Bad ideas work all the time.
You can skip Colorado-style pizza. The idea’s bad, it tastes bad, and it should be launched directly into the moon (the one true pizza pie).
Not everything has to be beautiful. The taco pizza from Happy Joe’s in Des Moines, Iowa is both delicious and awful.
Taco pizza is beautiful, shitty, awesome, delicious, and horrible. It is unapologetically Midwestern, the type of food that revs up my morbid food fascinations. I’m going to stop short of saying I love it, that’s simply not true, but I will say that the taco pizza will stay with me for quite some time.
Last week I posted a photo of Happy Joe’s taco pizza to Instagram, suggesting that my road trip has been less about eating fancy food and more about experiencing regional horrors. People really latched on to the word ‘horrors’ part because I proceeded to get buried in the comments. I have that coming every so often, but I stand by the statement. There’s a lot of mediocrity piled onto the Iowa-style taco pizza, but somehow when you combine all of that tepidness, all of that Caucasian-interpretation of Mexican food, it tastes good?
Start with the taco meat, which I believe is both beef and pork blasted with a healthy amount of cumin. Next is the refried beans, which I’m guessing come right from a can, and the cheddar and mozzarella cheese blend which almost certainly originate from a bag (Pre-shredded cheese contains cellulose and other preservatives, so it’s noticeably less creamy and decadent). Then there’s crunchy iceberg lettuce and an onslaught of so-so tomatoes. Finally, the pièce de résistance, seasoned tortilla chips on top. The chips completely mask the entire pizza itself. Look above. Do you see pizza? I don’t. The chips are great, though. They taste just like taco flavored Doritos, and they’re delicious. They seem unique in their shape, too, like they might even be homemade.
Like a Colorado-style mountain pie, the taco pizza also comes with packets of sauce. Only Happy Joe’s gives you Taco Bell-style taco sauce to rip-and-squirt on your pie. It has that comforting and iconic taco sauce flavor, a straightforward alchemy of tomato paste, vinegar, chili pepper, and cumin. All of these components, which individually could all easily be improved upon in some way, work together to provide that classic, American taco night experience. You know what the taco pizza is that the Colorado-style pie isn’t? Fun.
I’m not mad at the taco pizza for being inauthentic. It’s not supposed to be, and trying to achieve any of those lawful Mexican or Italian flavors would feel fake and forced. It’s experimental, loud, confusing, but undeniably tasty. I do feel like I could make a better one at home, or that somebody out there could make a better tasting pizza with the same ingredients. Maybe that’s what sticks in my craw about it—I know for a fact there’s a better execution of this idea somewhere.
Note: I went to Happy Joe’s while in Davenport, Iowa, because apparently that’s where the taco pizza was first invented back in 1974. I have been told, though, that Happy Joe’s is not the place to go. Godfather’s Pizza is said to be excellent, and at Casey’s, where the juicy and flavorful breakfast pizza is decidedly the move, I am told their taco pizza is equally excellent.
Regional Pizza Winner:
Iowa’s taco pizza by a landslide. It might be a mess, but the number one cardinal sin of food is being bland. There’s simply too much dull, doughy flavor in a Colorado-style mountain pie. I’m honestly astonished it’s a food.
I’m still a bigger fan of taco salads and the Taco Bell’s Mexican pizza. Nonetheless, food doesn’t always have to make sense or be wonderfully creative to be good. The taco pizza is proof of that.
Now get off my ass.
Thanks for reading The Move. Yee-haw! Subscribe if you can. Pay if you want (I do this for free).
Also, I’ll be continuing to write about Los Angeles foods starting next week. I ate at like 12 restaurants before I left, so plenty to keep me busy.
See ya on Monday!
Another great write-up, but I have to say that Happy Joe's is absolute trash. We have a Quad Cities-style pizza place in Chicago called Roots where I first had taco pizza and it is awesome - malty crust, high-quality sausage, crisp chips, etc. We stopped at Happy Joe's on a recent drive to Kansas City and were appalled by how bland and processed the pie tasted in comparison. The taco pizza is a great concept, but know there are much better versions out there than the one at Joe's. Also, their Italian buffet looked creepy as hell!