As a treat, on Friday I decided to get a take-away pizza on my way home from work, it had been a longer than expected work day and, as is the case every 4th week, it was my turn to be the duty manager on the night shift that night so I just wanted to be lazy, eat my dinner and go to bed in preparation for the shift ahead.
This particular pizza place offers something a little unusual, although not exotic, nacho chips as a topping, something I inadvertently tried a few years ago and rather liked. It's not something I do often but on this occasion I ordered my vegetarian pizza with nacho chips in addition to my normal favourites, mushrooms, tomatoes and sweet corn. All went well until I was about to pay, for some strange reason the price was 20kr (about £2 or $2.50) more than the advertised price for the standard vegetarian pizza, which has more toppings. I pointed out to the guy behind the counter that it's normal to swap out toppings at no extra cost, which he agreed was the norm at this particular pizza vendor too, however, it was not permitted to swap vegetable toppings, with a normal extra costs of 15kr, with meat toppings, with a normal extra cost of 20kr. Somewhat perplexed I asked him where the meat was on my pizza, to which he replied that, for reasons unbeknown to him, nacho chips are counted as meat.
Now I could go on a self indulgent rant about the quality of customer service provided by the employee, which really was not to my satisfaction, but that would be getting away from the point, which is that; for many years, I was under the, apparent, misapprehension that I was a vegetarian and that nacho chips were a product made by frying tortillas, a product traditionally made from mais. Who knew that milling mais into flour, making it into a dough, rolling it into flat bread, dry frying and then cutting into small triangles before deep frying and adding seasoning turned it into meat? It was news to me anyway. Thank you for filling a glaring hole in my knowledge Pizzabakeren, I shall amend my ways immediately and, indeed, investigate other apparently vegetarian products that become meat when they are fried.
I'm sure vegetarians the world over will be in shock to learn that, for years, they have, unwittingly, been consuming the very products they have been intentionally avoiding. Or is it possible that the management at Pizzabakeren are just a little bit silly and rather misguided? Either way, if we want good service and it's not forthcoming after a reasonable complaint, we are left with but one option, indeed I see it as a duty, to take my custom elsewhere, which is exactly what I will be doing in the future.
