Divide and Conquer

The Lonely Rectangle

At the end of August, Domino’s launched a new pizza in America and, with the kind of confidence usually reserved for royalty and minor dictators, named it after itself. The Domino is a rectangle. It’s shaped like the company logo, it’s Detroit-style, it’s cut into precisely two slices, and you may choose your sauce and up to three toppings, which is roughly the level of freedom you’d get from the set menu at a wedding. It is also, and this is the bit that matters, a pizza for one.

The company’s incoming chief executive explained the thinking with a line I’ve now read so many times it has started to feel like scripture: “When everyone wants something different, traditional pizza falls short.” I’ve turned that sentence over for a while now, from a cave in rural Spain, which is not a vantage point Domino’s marketing department has ever had to consider, and the longer I look at it, the less it reads like a sentence about pizza and the more it reads like a sentence about us. Or rather, about what certain people would very much like us to become.

Because pizza has never fallen short when everyone wants something different. That’s half the point of it. You argue, you compromise, somebody gets the half with anchovies, and everyone else pretends not to mind, and you eat the thing together out of one box going soft in the middle of the table. The negotiation was never a flaw in the product… the negotiation was the product. And a company that has spent the best part of seventy years selling the shared pizza has looked at that whole ritual, the squabbling, the compromise, the unspoken rules about who gets the last slice, and decided it’s a problem worth solving with a smaller box.

Nothing New Under the Pan

To be fair to Domino’s, and I’ll only do this once, they haven’t actually claimed to have invented the rectangle. The outgoing chief executive told investors the new product was unlike anything the company had offered before, which is a beautifully lawyered sentence if ever I heard one. Unlike anything Domino’s had offered. Not unlike anything anybody had offered. The distinction matters, because the rectangular pizza has been sitting in plain sight for most of the last century.

In Rome they’ve been selling pizza al taglio for generations… baked in long trays, cut with scissors to whatever size you point at, weighed and paid for by the gram. Nobody in Rome needed a strategy deck to work out that one person might want one piece of pizza with their own choice of topping on it. They simply cut a smaller bit. And Detroit-style, the very thing Domino’s has borrowed, goes back to 1946 and a bar called Buddy’s, where the story goes that the first ones were baked in heavy blue steel trays made for holding small parts on the city’s car production lines. The dough caramelised against the edges of the pan, the cheese ran right to the corners and burned into a crisp, lacy frame, and a working city got a working-class pizza out of industrial kit.

I find that almost unbearably neat. A pizza born in a borrowed tray from a car plant, reborn eighty years later as a corporate logo you can eat. If you wanted a single image for what happens to good, honest food once the people with spreadsheets get hold of it, I’m not sure you could do better.

Four Boxes Where Two Would Do

I’ll be honest about the limits of what I know here. I haven’t seen Domino’s cost sheets, and nobody I could find has published a price-per-square-inch comparison of the Domino against a regular large… but you don’t need the spreadsheet to understand the shape of the thing. Dough is about the cheapest food substance known to humanity. Flour, water, salt and a pinch of yeast. The cheese and toppings cost a bit more, but the real costs in a pizza business are the ones that don’t care how big your pizza is: the person who makes it, the oven time, the box, the driver, the card fee, the app. A large pizza for four and a small one for one take almost the same human effort to make and deliver. What changes is how many times you get to charge for that effort.

Picture a table of four. Last year they’d have argued their way to two large pizzas, maybe something garlicky on the side, one delivery, one transaction. This year each of them can have their own Domino, built exactly to their own taste, in their own box. Four boxes. Four transactions. Four sets of preferences fed into the data machine, which will remember each of them individually and greet them by name next time. The outgoing chief executive was refreshingly open that the new pizza is meant to add to the company’s existing business rather than cannibalise it, and that the team had studied what pizza-minded customers buy on the occasions they don’t buy pizza. Read that again slowly. They looked at the moments of your life when you weren’t eating their product and saw a gap in the market.

The timing tells you plenty too. The pizza category is soft. In the second quarter of this year, Domino’s grew its US same-store sales by a grand total of 0.1 per cent, and Domino’s was the winner… Papa John’s fell by more than 8 per cent and Pizza Hut by more than 2. When a market stops growing, you have two choices. Make something genuinely better, or find a way to sell the same thing more times to the same people. Turning one shared meal into four private ones is the second option, wearing the first one’s coat.

Years in security management leave you with one stubborn habit, which is looking at what a system is built to do rather than what it says it does. This one says it’s about choice. What it’s built to do is turn a table into a queue.

Meanwhile, in Naples

The pizza Domino’s is busy improving on was never really invented by anybody. It was invented by poverty. In eighteenth and nineteenth-century Naples it was street food for the poorest people in one of Europe’s most crowded cities… a flatbread with whatever was cheap on top, sold folded and eaten on the move. The two pizzas at the root of the whole family tree are the marinara (tomato, garlic, oregano, olive oil) and the margherita (tomato, mozzarella, basil), the second supposedly named after a visiting queen in 1889, although that story has been polished so often you can see your own face in it.

The rules for a proper Neapolitan pizza are strict, occasionally absurdly so, but they all point the same way: fewer things, done properly. A soft dough, a short and furiously hot bake of around a minute and a half, a puffed and leopard-spotted crust, and a centre so soft you either eat it with a knife and fork or fold it into quarters, a portafoglio, like a wallet, and eat it in the street. UNESCO added the craft of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo to its list of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage in 2017, which tells you how seriously the place takes it. You won’t find a build-your-own screen in a decent Naples pizzeria. You’ll find a menu of a dozen or so pizzas, a man with flour up to his elbows, and very little patience for special requests.

And here’s what the big brands would rather you didn’t notice. The Italian way isn’t more complicated than the delivery way. It’s dramatically simpler. All the complexity of the modern pizza, the endless toppings, the stuffed crusts, the dips, the drizzles, the rectangle named after the company, isn’t there because the food needs it. It’s there because the business does.

The Slice Nobody Has to Share

I don’t want to pretend that sharing a pizza is some sacred rite being stolen from us by a man in a boardroom in Michigan. People have eaten alone for as long as there have been people, and plenty will be glad of a hot lunch that fits neatly on a lap. Fair enough. I’ve eaten more than my share of meals alone, and some of them were among the best I’ve had.

But I keep coming back to that line about traditional pizza falling short, because it was never really about pizza. It’s a philosophy, and it’s spreading. Every playlist personalised, every feed tuned, every meal individually customised and individually charged… and every one of those improvements sold to us as freedom, when what it mostly does is make sure we never have to give an inch to the person sitting next to us. The compromise over the anchovies was a small thing. It was also practice for every bigger compromise we make with the people we live alongside, and you don’t keep a skill you never use.

I don’t know whether the Domino will be a hit. Given the money behind it, it probably will. I don’t know whether in ten years the box for one will be the normal way to order, and a big shared pizza in the middle of a table will look as quaint as a family photo album. What I do know is that the food itself never asked for any of this. Flour, water, salt, yeast, a tomato, some heat, and someone to eat it with. Everything else is somebody’s margin.

The Recipe They’d Rather You Didn’t Have

This makes four bases for a fraction of the price of one delivery. It works for meat eaters, vegetarians and vegans alike, and it asks far more of your patience than of your skill.

The dough (makes four)

500g “00” flour or strong white bread flour
325ml lukewarm water
10g fine salt
3g dried yeast (a scant teaspoon) for a slow fridge proof, or 7g for same-day
A splash of olive oil (optional)

Stir the yeast into the water. Put the flour in a large bowl, pour in the water and mix until there’s no dry flour left. Cover and leave it for 20 minutes, because this rest does a surprising amount of your kneading for you.
Add the salt and knead for 8 to 10 minutes until the dough is smooth and springy. It will be sticky. Resist the urge to drown it in flour.
Cover and leave for an hour, then divide into four, shape each piece into a tight ball and put them in a lightly oiled, covered container.
Into the fridge for 24 to 72 hours. The longer it waits, the better it tastes. (Same-day version: use 7g of yeast and leave the balls somewhere warm for 2 to 3 hours instead.)
Take the dough out an hour or two before cooking so it comes back to room temperature.

The sauce

A tin of good whole tomatoes crushed by hand, a pinch of salt, a little olive oil. That’s it. Don’t cook it… the oven does that.

Cooking without a pizza oven

Heat a heavy frying pan or cast-iron pan on the hob until it’s properly hot, and turn the grill up as high as it goes. Stretch a dough ball by hand, pressing from the centre outwards and leaving a thicker rim. Lay it in the dry pan, add sauce and toppings quickly, and cook for 2 to 3 minutes until the base is spotted underneath. Then slide the pan under the grill for another 2 to 3 minutes until the crust puffs and blisters. If you have a wood fire or a proper oven, hotter and shorter is always better.

Three pizzas, every diet

Marinara (vegan, and always has been): sauce, thinly sliced garlic, dried oregano, a generous drizzle of olive oil. One of the two original Naples pizzas, no adaptation required.
Margherita (vegetarian): sauce, torn mozzarella, olive oil, and fresh basil added once it’s out of the heat.
Your own: whatever’s in the fridge, but keep it to three toppings at most… which, as it happens, is exactly the limit Domino’s puts on its new rectangle. They just charge you for the privilege.

Until Next Time