This was mainly a nostalgia trip. I’ve been to this Gatti’s before and they have a nice buffet. Pasta bar, salad bar, five or six fresh baked pizza’s laid out for you to choose as many slices as you want. And very inexpensive. You can really throw down here if that’s what you want to do, but I was really thinking about another Gatti’s, the one that used to be on Florida near Sharp where I would meet my high school sweetheart on Friday nights after I was done playing football at Olympia Stadium, or occasionally at Memorial Stadium. She’d wait at Gatti’s with friends while I took the long bus ride home with my guys (we had a lot of injuries my senior year and ended up losing more games than we won) and taking a quick shower and jumping into the Rambler to go catch up with her. We would always order her favorite–Canadian bacon, mushroom, black olive–and gaze at each other over the top of the plastic pitcher of beer we shared before paying up and finding a parking lot to work on our night moves. These guys on Essen went a little crazy with the black olives, and the sauce now seems almost as bright as Chef Boyardee, and the one on Florida seemed a lot swankier (at least to us back then) and wasn’t mainly a buffet like this one is now.
Some memories still taste good, no matter how old they become. She was and still is a fantastic artist, but when she was born again, I just couldn’t take that journey with her. Every now and then I will order up a Canadian bacon, mushroom, and black olive just to think back on those days filled with passion and drama and joy and fear as only the last days of high school can be, but when it’s about the pizza, I’m always going to head over to Fleur de Lis or maybe Red Zeppelin. Then and now. Funny how they only intersect now and then.