Chomp!
January 17, 2014
By Ron Aiken
January 17, 2014
Pizza! Elgin! The Elgin House of Pizza!
It’s not terribly often, but sometimes Chomp! wants pizza.
What makes that more often than Chomp! would care to admit is that his life has within it three children, aged 18, 14 and 8, for whom pizza is some kind of elemental force as necessary to their survival as air, water or fire. It is their reason for living, the apex of their joy.
I can live with that, and a good pizza, after all, is a thing of happiness. Chomp!’s definition of good pizza, however, differs TREMENDOUSLY with that of the children’s. Tremendously.
For them, a frozen pizza constitutes a good supper, not a terrifying torture device. And toppings? Oh, how their limitations do so vex Chomp! For them, a plain cheese pizza is the height of art form…you can add pepperoni, BUT ONLY IF YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST. To them, adding more toppings to a pizza – ingredients as avante garde as say, black olives or mushrooms – is like adding ketchup to cereal. The faces they make! The refusals they voice!
This is the face Chomp! gets when he suggests mushrooms on a pizza.
This is what Chomp! lives with, and Chomp! can say without fear of contradiction that he has eaten more and plainer pizza in the past six months than the last 16 years of his life. FACT!
So, rather than be the fussy curmudgeon he has fancied himself all these long years, Chomp! compromises, Chomp! understands, Chomp! accommodates the philistine ways of the ones he loves.
To a point.
When it was suggested that Chomp! bring home pizza for supper from a chain restaurant, his face squinched and his intestines curled so tight he nearly burst from the very idea. Understand, I’ve made sacrifices in this area – I recently went inside the living hell that is a CiCi’s pizza and emerged broken and desensitized, sporting the thousand-yard stare of people who have been through combat. I shudder even now to recall the horror I bore witness to that night.
So, negotiations ensued and a bargain struck. Since the aforementioned children reside in Elgin, I bit the bullet and at least insisted we’d eat local and not at a chain, opting to meet at the Elgin House of Pizza (1101 Church St., Elgin, 438-8650).
And thank God for that.
My taste in pizza was formed from an early age growing up in Irmo and eating at Zorba’s on pretty much a weekly basis. The height of Columbia pizzery, for me, has been and always will be the Zorba’s Special pizza with its million ingredients, crunchy crust and sticky, gooey, perfectly browned cheese on top. While I love everything from fancy artisanal pizzas from wood-fired ovens to the simple, classic beauty that is a pizza from LaBrasca’s, for me, the Zorba’s Special is tops.
Which is why I’m now such a fan of the Elgin House of Pizza’s House Special, because it is nearly identical to Zorba’s pizza both in quality (and quantity) of toppings and in care of preparation.
Opened in 1991, current owner Mahmoud Kamel took over in 2009 after starting his career at the restaurant as a dishwasher in 1999. Speaking to him, his dedication to quality and his passion for the place is clear – he said for people from the Middle East, taste is king when it comes to food, especially vibrant, spicy flavors. He said that’s why his food and his pizza are different from his competitors (of which there are more than one, even in tiny Elgin) and why he has enjoyed a solid, loyal customer base for so long.
It’s no wonder. Here’s the House Special pizza:
Nicely browned on top, the ingredients were extremely flavorful and filling, missing out on none of the taste I’ve come to love from Zorba’s.
And here’s the plain pepperoni pizza for the teenagers with us:
Still pretty delicious-looking, right?
The bottom line is that I’ll be back, probably many, many times.
As for the other related House of Pizzas in Pontiac and Camden, I know nothing of the one in Camden and can only say of the one in Pontiac that I will never walk through its doors after my lady and I, drenched from a downpour and starving at about 15 minutes to close, were turned away by a sassy staff member who said it was too close to closing time to seat us and sent us back out in the rain and darkness. Chomp! is not proud to say he makes a particular hand gesture toward the Pontiac House of Pizza every time he drives past it, but he does, and he does so with relish and glee in his little grudge-holding heart.
For the Elgin House of Pizza, however, great service, great food and great pizza mean repeat business, and it’s especially nice to find a place with food to suit tastesbude ranging from the refined (Chomp!) to the ridiculously plain. Til next week!
P.S. Oh, and Chomp!’s lady surprised him by getting some baklava to take home. Here it is!
Said baklava. And YES, that IS a Star Wars Princess Leia slave-girl glass from the Return of the Jedi collection you’re seeing there, so be jealous. Be very, very jealous.
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