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So, Is Burned Pizza A Thing?

4/7/2026

Books by Patti Liszkay available on Amazon:
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"Tropical Depression"       https://www.amzn.com/B0BTPN7NYY

So, Is Burned Pizza A Thing?

On Thursday evening, March 26, Tom and I saw a sublime performance of "Miss Saigon" at the Short North Stage in downtown Columbus.

Having decided to seek out some dinner before the show, I looked online in advance for an eatery close to the Short North Stage. I found a pizzeria a few doors down from the theater called Pauli Gee's.
The prices were, I thought, a weence on the expensive side for pizza, but the place had stellar online reviews:

And so we decided to give Pauli Gee's a try.

The place had a charming interior, and the crowd there at 5:30 pm on a Thursday night appeared to verify the positive online reviews.

We decided to spilt an $18, 10" tomato, mozzarella and basil pizza. It arrived looking like this on top:

...and this on the bottom:

The purportedly best pizza place in Columbus brought us a burned pizza!
Or so I thought. Tom asked our friendly server about the state of our pizza. They explained to us with much enthusiasm that this was a wood-fired pizza, and so the crust wasn't burned, but "charred," as a wood-fired pizza was supposed to be.
Oh. Okay. I looked around the restaurant and tried to catch a glimpse of my fellow diners’ pizzas. From what I could see, their pizzas also looked to be pretty well "charred."
We proceeded to consume our charred wood-fired pizza, which tasted burned to us. In fact, I'd have said it was inedible if not for the fact that we were eating it and so was everybody else.
Later I googled some online images of Pauli Gee’s pizzas. They were charred every one.

I did more online research to see if by chance there was an anti-charred pizza contingent.
Apparently not:

In fact, among all the reviews I saw only one reference made to the charring. And that one was pro-char.

So what can I say?
As for me, if in the past I ever made a pizza that turned out like this,

...I’d have tossed it. Or at least tried to scrape off the burnt part. In the future, though, I guess I would serve it up proudly and call it charred (though I, for one, wouldn't eat it).

7 Comments

Why I Missed The No Kings March

4/1/2026

19 Comments

Sadly, I did not participate, except in spirit, in any of the March 28 No King's Marches here in Columbus, Ohio.

I was not among the 20,000 marchers who took to the streets in the greater Columbus area because for the past few weeks my upper respiratory system has been under siege by a virus.
Magnified 500,000 times, here's what my virus looks like under a microscope.

   It's a shape-shifting zombie virus.
That is to say, this nanoscopic little demon might attack for a few days in the form of a headache and sore throat, then beat a retreat before returning a few days later as a killer cough with a sidekick of sinus congestion from hell, until it mutates yet again into some or another underhanded entity that leaves me plodding along in that tired, achy, indescribably crappyesque state that my mother the nurse used to call general malaise, which is where I more or less was last Saturday.
   It's my understanding that a virus is not exactly a living thing. But it's not exactly a not-living thing, either. It's somewhere between a living thing and a not-living thing. In other words, a zombie. Which is why, though a virus can kill you, you can't kill it.
(If only someone could figure out how to shoot out the brains of a microbe).
  Still, I'm thankful from the bottom of my cough-wracked rib cage to all those patriotic Americans who were part of No Kings:
My good friends,