Sixteen Volts

In one Mafalda comic strip that I remember reading, after he is annoyed by something, Manolito complains that right now there are bullets shot that don't hit anybody, and that this is a waste. I watched "Lord of War" last week, and liked it starting from the title sequence where the life of a bullet is followed from the bullet's point of view, starting from the assembly line and ending at the moment this bullet hits the head of a small African boy. The very moment Jared Leto's character shows up on the screen, you just knew that he is the redshirt Christ Figure Who Ends Up Paying For His Brother's Sins. I can understand why this movie wasn't a financial success, though. My wife is watching it now before we go out to have lunch, so maybe I'll write something about food.

I reminisced about burgers earlier in my post "For your grownup tastes", so perhaps I shall next similarly reminisce about pizza. For all the plentiful food available around here, I have never really been satisfied about the pizza that is served in the major pizza chains. I like mine thin crust, but local chains seem to serve slices with thick crust. In the city, Amato's and Mamma's are fortunately exceptions to this, their slices having a much thinner crust than the slices served at, say, Pizza Pizza.

But one thing that I am sorely missing around here is a proper pizza buffet so that for one fee you could eat as many slices of pizza as you want, in style of the Finnish chain Rax that me and my wife used to frequent when we lived in Tampere. Their pizza was quite good (but greasy, or perhaps it was good because of that), and since my wife likes her pizza with just cheese and nothing else on it, I got my slices served with double pepperoni, which made it the exact right amount of toppings. It would be great if there was a pizza joint around here that served pizza like Amato's but operated on an all-you-can-eat principle. Oh heck, maybe when I turn fifty, I'll start my own pizza buffet "Don Ilkkario's" that works according to this basic principle.

If I ever really started such place, I should actually try to make it like "Donatello" in Tampere. Back in the day I used to eat at Donatello all the time, which really ended up showing in my waistline. This place was always so busy and did great business so that I am sure that they are still operational and successful, but since I don't know how their food is now, I'll write of what I remember. During the lunch hours, this place was nominally a pizza buffet, but their lunchtime pizza was so thick-crusted and topped with so many kinds of weird things all at once that I usually ate only one or two slices of that. Fortunately, in addition to pizza, this place featured several other kinds of great foods. The exact dishes tended to vary depending on what the cook felt like making that day, I guess, but there was usually lasagna (which was much better than the crappy stuff Rax called lasagna), bacon-wrapped sausages, burritos and many other kinds of delicious food that when I think about it makes my eyes close and mouth drop open and make that throaty noise that Homer Simpson makes when he sees something delicious.

In addition, while I was eating at Donatello I could read the "Seura" and "Apu" general interest magazines, which (just like the Uuno Turhapuro movies) are read by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Finns but come to think of it, at that time I didn't actually know anybody who would have actually paid money to subsribe to these magazines. Get nourished and widen your horizons at the same time. Can a man really ask for anything more? I remember reading this one article in Seura that I found unintentionally humorous: it was about a Finnish guy who had moved to Moscow after the Soviet collapse, at the time when Russia was the "Wild East" where anything goes. He ran a restaurant there and happily explained how he is much more free now in Russia, since there are no unions or sexual harassment laws or anything like that to hinder the free men. In the picture that accompanied this story, the guy was smiling with his hand resting on the ass of a pretty waitress.

After the buffet hours, Donatello became a normal pizzeria. The evening pizzas had a nice thin crust and was topped exactly the way that my pizza ought to be topped with proper ground beef (instead of that semi-icky stuff that pizzerias around here call "ground beef") and mozzarella cheese. And this pizza was big enough and it didn't even fit the huge plate, so you saw with your own eyes that you were getting value for your money.

There was also another pizza place in the same street that we went to a couple of times. I think it was called "Torino" or something like that, and their style of pizza was quite different and they served, for example, buffalo, crocodile and reindeer pizza. Probably still active, although they never seemed to be as successful as their neighbour a block away. I would imagine that the ubiquitous cheap pizza-kebab places are severely eating into their business: I remember once seeing in their window a photocopied magazine article about the way that these cheapo joints don't pay taxes and that's why they can be so inexpensive. There might be some kind of a moral lesson to be learned here.

But speaking of taxes and value for money, there was an interesting quirk in the Finnish tax law that made buffet eating a great value of almost Las Vegas scale. According to the tax law, companies can pay for their employees' lunches with pre-tax money, making it a great break for the employee in this cold and dark land of high taxes. To keep track of who is paying for whose food, there is a simple and convenient system of standard "lunch vouchers" in place. These lunch vouchers are special kind of "money" earmarked for dining that all restaurants (but only restaurants) accept as payment for food (not including alcohol) and you can't get any change back for using these vouchers.

The translation agency that my wife worked for participated in this system, so she always kept bringing home these lunch vouchers worth 38 marks each. We did the math and it turned out that with her tax rate (including both income and payroll taxes) and the fact that her employer additionally subsidized these lunch vouchers, each lunch voucher of 38 marks ended up decreasing her net income only by 22 marks (about 5 dollars Canadian, or 4 dollars US). Since a great lunch buffet such as Donatello or the Golden Unicorn Chinese buffet (another great place that I frequented from my student years, but had to end this after I one day received an extremely painful biochemistry lesson about this interesting compound called "MSG") typically cost around this 38 or 40 marks back then, getting to eat all that good food for five measly bucks would be nothing short of a superb deal that you certainly couldn't find anywhere around here these days!

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, June 24, 2006 at 8:28 AM