Endless Road Trip Germany: Joey’s Pizza

There are few things I love more than pizza and weird food combinations, and Germany has a plethora of both. Forget the schnitzel; you can buy personal pizzas at many of the bakeries on the street or most notably the places in the train stations, the same way you’d walk up and buy a pretzel. They even have pizza vending machines if you’re in a hurry or if the stores are closed. My last visit to Germany in 2010 yielded this weird pizza discovery when I saw thunfisch pizza (TUNA PIZZA), but when your best friend moves there and you go to visit for your birthday, things get wild.

After hearing endless stories about Joey’s Pizza, a chain that specializes in weird pizza, I immediately put it on my “must eat” list for my short, 6 day visit.  I know we have some pretty crazy pizza here in America, but we don’t order it or want it enough to keep an entire weird pizza CHAIN in business. I’m not sure if Joey’s thinks that this pizza is normal, or if they market it as being outrageous  (always hard to tell, with Germans). It was my first experience with Joey’s, but not my friend’s, who orders Joey’s regularly as a hangover cure.  Unfortunately they didn’t have her favorite seasonal pizza (Carbonara, topped with bacon and spaghetti), so we decided on three others:

1. Pizza Bombay

chicken, pineapple, curry sauce (still not really sure what this was)

2. Pizza Crazy Dog

“little sausages” (sliced up hot dogs), Danish pickles, ketchup, Danish remoulade, and french fried onions

3. Pizza Dutchman

ham, tomatoes, broccoli,  and hollandaise sauce

I don’t know what my favorite part was; the pizza or the delivery man, who undoubtedly biked our pizza there, in the rain, in what looked similar to a fisherman’s survival suit. The crust tasted like some sort of pre-stamped-out pizza dough. But, if you noticed, there is a layer of sauce and cheese peeking out from under all these weird ingredients. I wanted to hate them so badly. But I just couldn’t. I also couldn’t stop eating them. Something about the dried out little hot dogs next to the weird creamy, burnt sauce on top of the other cheese just really did it for me.

Please, go to Germany. And after drinking too much Kölsch, order from Joey’s. You may realize you don’t mind eurotrash as much as you think.