Too Good to be True

Many bargains, deals, offerings, and opportunities that come about in life are just too good to be true. Meaning that there’s a catch. Either the item you are getting is not as good as promised, or the price is inflated by additional, previously undisclosed costs and fees. Usually, if you are surprised at what a great deal you are getting, it is because there is information that you are missing.

The best example of something too good to be true (or at least, too good to last) happened to me when I was a teenager. I grew up in a little suburb of San Jose, called Willow Glen. It was a nice residential area of the city that had a small but active downtown business area. We had a movie theater, fast food joints, shops, restaurants, and even a comic book shop that I frequented at least a couple times every month.

As much as I enjoyed my comic books, the downtown location that I loved the most was a tiny, hole in the wall, pizza shop called Willow’s Pizza. I loved pizza as a kid (still do, actually), and I thought that Willow’s Pizza was the best pizza in the world.

San Jose has literally hundreds of pizza places, most of them chain restaurants, but a few family owned placed as well. All of them made good pizza. It’s actually difficult to make bad pizza, honestly. Bread, sauce, and cheese is a difficult combination to screw up. A few places have managed it (I’m looking at you, Pizza Hut) but for the most part, I can get pizza anywhere and enjoy it.

Willow’s pizza was different. Willow’s pizza was special.

Willow’s had a soft, pillowy, bready crust that I loved. It was firm and thin through the middle of the pizza, then puffed up large and chewy around the edges to form a sort of bowl. The bowl shape was intentional so the pizza could hold an enormous amount of toppings. Willow’s put more cheese, meat, and other toppings on their pizza than any pizza joint I have found before, or since. No one even comes close.

A large Willow’s pizza would hold pounds, not ounces, of toppings, and provided enough food to feed a family of four, and leave leftovers for everyone to have lunch the next day.

And the leftovers the next day, were the best part. For some reason, Willow’s pizza was just as good cold as it was hot out of the oven. There was nothing about this pie that I didn’t consider gustatorial perfection.

Enough about the taste. Let’s talk about price. Willow’s pizza was about half the cost of any other competitor within a 50-mile radius of their restaurant. Nobody could even come close. Other shops were charging about $10 to $15 for a large pizza (remember, this was the 1980’s). Willow’s would charge six or seven bucks for a pizza that was the same size, but had three times the toppings.

There were days I wondered how Willow’s could even stay in business. How did they make money when they sold so much food at such ridiculously low prices? I figured they just did so much business all day long that they could manage to keep running despite the small profits they made on any individual pizza.

My friends and family ate there all the time. At that price, why not? You could order a pizza to go, or you could eat at the restaurant. It was a small shop and it only had a few tables. If you were lucky, you might find a table open, otherwise you and your friends could take a pizza across the street and eat at one of the outdoor tables that Jack in the Box had in their parking lot. The managers at the burger joint didn’t like it, but if you bought a soda from them before you sat down, they would leave you alone.

The soda at Jack in the Box cost almost as much as my share of the pizza, but if you didn’t want to eat while standing around on the sidewalk, that was the cost of sitting down.

Even though I no longer live in San Jose, I would still be driving 150 miles occasionally to get a Willow’s pizza except for one small problem. Willow’s Pizza closed down in 1983.

Apparently, Willow’s didn’t make a profit because they had so many customers. That fantasy was too good to be true. You can’t put five dollars-worth of food on a seven-dollar pizza and make enough money to pay your staff and operating expenses. It doesn’t matter how many pizzas you sell. It was all just too good to be true.

One day, several friends and I went to Willow’s to get a pizza, but the doors were closed and police tape surrounding the building.

Apparently, the owners of Willow’s Pizza had been selling drugs in a back room of the shop as their main source of income. The pizza part of the deal was just a cover to launder their money. The police had caught on to what was going on and arrested the owners. The shop was closed down as a crime scene.

The dream was over.

They say that crime doesn’t pay, and ultimately, in this case, I suppose that’s true.

But it sure made one hell of a pizza.

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