Sorry about that title - it is a bit obvious, isn't it? But still ...
Tell me. You want a pizza. Who would you rather have cook that pizza for you? A top chef ... or some spotty teenager with dubious hygiene at a chain pizza outlet?
Well, it seems that the Italians are up in arms about the fact that top chef Ferran Adria is planning to open a pizzeria in Barcelona.
One Italian pizza chap, according to the LA Times said:
"The secret of the pizza is inside the blood. You don't wake up one morning and improvise yourself as a pizzaiolo. I've been doing this for over 18 years, and I still don't feel like I've mastered it. You need to know how to touch the dough. You need to know how to deal with the ingredients. You don't become pizzaiolo, you are born pizzaiolo."
Hang on a minute. For as long as I can remember pizza, or something called pizza, has been sold on just about every street in America and the UK. This is probably true of most of the western world. This varies from the very nice product from my local pizza shop to flaccid slices of bread-like stuff with what seems to be tomato ketchup and a cheese slice on top. (Have you ever had a 'pizza' at a Disney food outlet? Grim. Or a 'pizza slice' at an airport?)
In America in particular, strange toppings which could never be imagined by any Italian have been created. "So that's a large pizza with pineapple, sausage, bacon, pepperoni and Cajun peanuts, sir? Extra American cheese with that? Soda? Fries?"
So why make a fuss about Adria? To ensure that he's making the best possible pizza, Adria is on what they call a 'fact-finding' tour of Italy. Never mind that he's a top chef, he still feels the need to get to the home of the pizza and discover the true secrets to making an authentic Italian dish. Do the fast food pizza outlets send all their staff to Italy to do that? Have all the staff at your local pizza shop done that?
And as for Mr Pizzaiolo in that quote back there, would you really want a pizza cooked by someone who has been doing it for eighteen years but hasn't quite mastered it yet? Don't you think that after all this time he should call it a day and look for a different job?
It's bad enough that America has taken over the pizza as its own. You've heard about the little boy on holiday in Rome:
"Hey mom, they've got pizza here in Italy!"
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