[Zhang Fei]

[Worst pizza I ever ate was at Shakeys in Tokyo.

The on in Rome was a close runner up!]

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Assuming you’re referring to airport food, I can’t really complain. Airport concessions come at a high cost, but are oligopolies catering to a captive audience, which means for concession holders, they’re a license to rape and pillage. Shakeys wasn’t great but it wasn’t the worst airport food I’ve had the displeasure to consume. What’s bad is that it’s worse-tasting than its non-airport counterpart from the same franchise *and* costs more. The worst Popeye’s I’ve ever had was at an airport. Ditto for just about every franchise operation I’ve ever frequented.

Having said that, even bad pizza is, well, pizza. It’s basically a bread dough, tomato sauce, Italian spice mix and cheese baked in an oven. Hard to really screw that up. Even bad Shakey’s isn’t all that bad. But it’s probably an indication of how far it’s strayed from what we consider pizza that close to 90% of its outlets are located overseas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakey%27s_Pizza

[Pilsner]

Having said that, even bad pizza is, well, pizza.

Next I stood in line half an hour to see what Marxism could do to street-vendor pizza. It did not disappoint. The word cottony is sometimes used to describe bad pizza dough, but there is every reason to believe this pizza was really made of the stuff, or maybe a polyester blend.

The slice-- more accurately, lump-- had no tomato whatsoever and was covered in a semiviscous imitation mozzarella, remarkably un-chese-like even for a coal-tar by-product. Then there was the sausage topping. One bite brought a flood of nostalgia. Nobody who's been through a fraternity initiation will ever forget this taste, this smell. It was dog food.

P.J. O'Rourke describing a visit to East Berlin.