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Antonio's, a clever little pizzeria just past Spectrum India, has recently begun thinking outside of the cone.
"Toledo sells the same old, tired, run-of-the-mill, hackneyed, cornball, trite cone pizza," said Antonio's manager James Pinkerton, quickly closing a thesaurus.com widget on his iPhone. "And frankly, people want change."
"Modification, adjustment, metamorphosis," he added, glancing down at the phone.
Antonio's new "Circle Pizza" is quite a metamorphosis indeed. Instead of filling sauce, cheese and mix-ins into the ingredient hole of a traditional dough cone, chefs at Antonio's have instead decided to spread the fixins evenly across a 2 dimensional "pie" of dough.
"We call them 'toppings,'" bragged Pinkerton, sitting back in his chair.
In addition, Antonio's chefs have taken to the skies, tossing mounds of dough high into the air like Frisbees to shape them into large disks, as opposed to filling dough balls into conventional cast iron, conical mini-woks and hollowing them out with paper water cooler cups.
Pinkerton originally met with skepticism when he removed the grid of tiny, suspended metal basketball rims from his cone pizza oven, leaving only a flat bottomed oven which he simply and boldly dubbed, "the pizza oven," but it seems that his circle pizza fad has begun to catch on. Already, a second circle pizzeria, Nice Slice, has popped up directly across the street and has also experienced moderate success.
"At Toledo, one cone feeds one person, if that," explained Nice Slice manager Ralph Pittman when asked about the secret to his success. "Our circle pizza is specifically divided into slices for group enjoyment, and can be shared by up to 8 people. Actually, it can be shared by up to infinity people. It really just depends on how you cut it."
"My favorite part is the 'crust,'" began student-consumer Jeremy Estefan '13. "Am I saying that right? Crust?"
At first customers were confused and angered by the pizzerias' use of unrolled cone plates to serve their pizzas, but as time goes on it seems more and more like circle pizza is here to stay.
When asked about the growing threat of competition, however, Toledo's manager Tony Mendozza remained unconcerned.
"It's a novelty, a fad, a flash in the pan," began Mendozza. "An oddness, a vicissitude, a dernier cri, a zeitg- Ah, shit. My battery died."
