It's Pizza. It's Salad. It's Pizzalad!
Portmanteau food has brought us many gifts over the years, like mocktails, cronuts, and... pluots. But what happens when you marry two best friends, like pizza and salad? You get a pizzalad! Chicago news station ABC7 has introduced me to something I never knew existed, and when the polar ice melts off the roads, this may call for a short 20-minute road trip for an in-person investigation.
Pappi's Pizza in Glenview, a suburb of Chicago, blends cold salad and pizza into a hybrid handheld that sounds pretty damn good, to be honest, and yes, they do call it a "pizzalad." It starts on a pre-baked cracker-thin crust, and the cold salad is put on top; they do it with extra care to make this thing as pretty as possible.
"The way we've constructed the vegetables, the way we put them on to the pizza, everything is generally symmetrical," Jeffrey Ramirez, an employee at Pappi's (and son of the owner), told ABC7. "Everything is placed specifically for the pizza to stand out. It's usually the talk of the night, the moment they just look at the pizza, without even trying it, without even tasting it, your eyes just gravitate towards it and it just becomes a focal point. When somebody see it and tastes it, generally, they're hooked."
The pizzalads are assembled to order and sell out daily. There's a BLT, a Southwestern pizza salad, a Buffalo chicken, and a chicken Caesar version. I don't know about you, but having a salad with my pizza makes me feel spiritually lighter than if I have a pizza by itself. I feel some of you nodding with me, out there, through these cold Internet walls. If you can't tell, I love this idea. Cobb pizzalad? Waldorf chicken pizzalad? Tabbouleh? My mind is expanding at a galactic rate and this is all thanks to you, pizzalad.