CharlesPaolino's Blog

What country has the greatest number of Domino pizza restaurants per capita?

That’s right! Iceland!

Oh, that wasn’t your guess? Well it wouldn’t have been mine either, but them’s the facts, at least according to a blogger on IcelandReview.com.

There are relatively few fast-food chains in Iceland, as we Americans know and love them, so we have noticed the Domino restaurants when we’ve been there, but only as an anomaly. Frankly, eating pizza never has occurred to us in Iceland and, even if it did, we wouldn’t have eaten Domino’s pizza there any more than we would eat it here.

The blogger, Aina Fuller, who is writing from Italy, not from Iceland, is musing over where she has had the best pizza of her life. I don’t have to think about that; it was the pizza my grandmother made, but there’s no point in dwelling on the unattainable. Fuller’s journal includes this observation:

But the glaring memory of the best in my mind, pulsing with Icelandic enthusiasm, is a mixed cheese pizza I had from a tiny restaurant in Saudárkrókur, where we shamelessly dipped bite after bite in home-made jam.
 
(For the foreign contingent, I know what you’re thinking. Pizza and jam might sound like trying to play a violin with a chicken feather, but don’t knock it ‘til you try it—and inevitably start doing it with a lot more strange combinations than pizza.)  

CHEF KRAMER

Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I won’t be trying that. I have to go along with Poppie, who told Cosmo Kramer that if you let people put anything they want – including cucumbers – on pizza, pretty soon you can no longer call it pizza.  

Fuller mentioned salted cod as a favorite home-grown topping for Icelandic pizza, and she accurately pointed out that it isn’t so far afield of the anchovies Italians like. In fact, even though I normally don’t eat anchovies, I would inhale the pizzas my grandmother made with anchovies, garlic and wild mushrooms. I was surprised – maybe I should say relieved – that Fuller didn’t report that Icelanders like to top their pizzas with the rancid shark meat that is supposed to be such a delicacy up there. 

Her blog is a lot of fun. It’s at this link:

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_life/?cat_id=16539&ew_o_a_id=324402