'Za Gotcha

Allow me to tender a formal – well, no, actually, rather an exceedingly casual – apologia to those professional piemongers at Austin's Pizza. Because I'd assumed – years ago, before any of their Food Poll wins, even – that their product was Teh Suck, and I'd assumed wrong.

Oh, so very wrong.

On the other hand, this assumption wasn't entirely my fault. The blood, metaphorically, is partially on other hands: Those hands that hold the moneybags that fund the operation that bakes the pizzas. Because, look, how does one initially judge a company, a commercial concern, by other than its public face? By other than its logo, basically?

And long before I'd tasted any of their fine product, I'd only been aware of Austin's Pizza via their logo – glimpsed in print ads, on billboards, on their South Lamar signage, and so on.

And, I mean, look at the goddam thing.

It makes the gorge rise, doesn't it? It's a sterling example of what artist B. Kliban was talking about in his illustrated essay on the phenomenon he called Nephew Art: Where you have a more or less professional operation, but when it comes to graphic identity, the head honcho will hire (perhaps as a favor to an older sister) one of his or her putatively talented nephews to create a logo and collateral promotional material. And sure as shit ain't shinola, that nephew ain't gonna be Chip Kidd or Paula Scher or Chris Ware.

Is that what happened here?

Which is unfortunate, because when I finally encountered some of the actual product, when I finally sunk my grill into a few pies from Austin's Pizza and the crust and the ingredients had time to say a gustatory howdy-do to my taste buds before continuing on their peristaltic journey gutward?

My mouth was in heaven.

Seriously.

And Austin's Pizza has the brilliance to adorn their goat-cheese-and-pesto pie (perhaps the tastiest of them all) with the moniker of "Pesto A-Go-Goat," which is soooooo fun to say, especially if you're a little stoned and hanging around with friends while waiting for it to arrive, and which makes you wonder again why, with all this culinary and nominative goodness going on, the folks in charge of A.P. marketing insist on retaining that sorry excuse for a corporate logo.

"Well, actually, Brenner," my friend Sylvia pointed out as I harangued her on this very subject last week, "they've upgraded the old logo."

Say what?

"Yeah," she continued. "I mean, the new one's nothing special, it's just a cropped version of the old one, but still."

"It's not that little yellow lame-ass running stick figure?"

"Well, it is," said Sylvia, "but they've cropped out the legs – kind of like Starbucks did with their mermaid when they got too fancy to show her crotch anymore, remember? And the Austin's Pizza guy's legs were always the stupidest-looking part of the old logo, right? So your argument is kind of, well, it's just a little outdated now, bubeleh."

"So it's really not that bad now, y'think?"

"You wanna order one and find out?" she suggested.

"Pesto-A-Go-Goat?"

"As long as you're paying," she said, "I couldn't care less."