A staple of every college student’s mostly (un)balanced diet is pizza. From pepperoni to cheese to dessert, most students find themselves eating some type of pizza on a weekly basis.
The popular place to get it is at the Marketplace where they are made in-house in a fire brick oven. The person who most often makes it, and is most popular, is Pizza Dave.
Pizza Dave comes from a background of working in various restaurants and has been cooking his entire life. For example, he has been employed at Taco Bell and Domino’s where he worked for six years. He started here in August of 2019, and since then, he has seen changes to how the pizza making process works. Two of the biggest changes include the recognition of his pizza skills and the experimentation of different pizzas.
“You only get feedback at those places if it’s bad,” Pizza Dave said. “So, to have everyone come be like ‘this is so good,’ is very nice.”
Having only been here a short amount of time, Pizza Dave has already made a quite name for himself on the Etown’s campus. When scrolling through Etown’s own app, the Jays App, it is not uncommon to see posts praising his pizza and general personality. Occasionally, Pizza Dave has seen these posts and values the thought behind them, even if he sometimes needs clarification on Generation Z slang terms.
“I was told I got popular on the Jay’s App last year, and I figured out how to look at it,” Pizza Dave said. “I think it’s very nice that everyone appreciates my customer service.”
Some of the posts are just simply complimenting his pizzas or strombolis. Others engage in memes or even hakius to express their appreciation for Pizza Dave.
“Christian [Gingrich] gets me,” Pizza Dave said. “His haiku made my week.”
With the coronavirus pandemic beginning only in Pizza Dave’s second semester, he has had plenty of time to experiment outside the rigid structure of traditional restaurants with different types of pizza and pizza making techniques. When someone brings him an idea, he gets the chance to try something new.
“It’s a mutative process,” Pizza Dave said.
One experimental pizza that ended up being a giant success among students was the cinnamon dessert pizza. In fact, it is even Pizza Dave’s profile picture on the Jay’s App. The idea was born from a student working at the Marketplace, sophomore Sam Wilson, asked Pizza Dave for a cinnamon honey butter, similar to that of a popular chain restaurant’s butter that they serve with bread rolls.
“I whipped one up and put out crocks of stuff. No one took it,” Pizza Dave said. “But when I put it on pizza, boom. It was gone. I just evolved it up from there.”
If you have any suggestions or ideas for a pizza that you think could be the next hit, let Pizza Dave know or post it on the Jays App! You never know until you try it!
