Pizza King (West), Phillips Street

The Pizza King on Phillips is a quintessentially-Midwestern pizza joint. Tucked away in the City's lovely Silk Stocking neighborhood and adjacent to a revolving cast of smoke shops, the Phillips Street Pizza King “strip” is what people think of when they imagine Rust Belt Indiana. 

There are exactly five chairs in Pizza King, each one concealed by a week’s worth of Kokomo Tribunes. There is no table. While waiting for your pizza, you can enjoy a great view of the King’s old-school pizza oven and the typically two employees on duty that night. You can also marvel at a menu board that clearly hasn't been swapped out since the Reagan era.  

"So that's how you spell 'Roquefort'" . . . 

When your pizza emerges from the oven, they sling it in a bag, tent it just so, and send your happy ass out the door. This part is cool. The whole “pizza-in-a-bag” bit is a clear departure from contemporary fast food’s obsession with portability and convenience (“Look! Now you can eat your Tater-Tot Burrito Bites while climbing Mt. Everest!"), plus . . . well, it’s pizza that comes in a bag. 

Founded in 1956, Pizza King is how takeout pizza probably tasted in the 1960s: a thin, spartan, salty crust; ascetic, personality-less tomato sauce; and just enough cheese to let you know it’s there. A big part of what sets Pizza King apart from other Kokomo pizza places is the reasonable layer of cheese (obscene cheese will no doubt become a theme on this blog); in fact, we’ve watched Pizza King cooks as they painstakingly distribute tiny fingerfuls of cheese across a pie. This attention to detail makes for a bite of pizza that strikes just the right ratio of the holy trinity of crust/toppings/cheese. 

There’s sauce in there, too, but you’re not supposed to notice it. The sauce is as nondescript as it gets. Come to think of it, it could very well be a freshly-opened can of Del Monte tomato sauce. Somehow its mild affect tastes just right atop the brackish crust and below the smattering of carefully-placed toppings. One gets the sense that the King must need a dedicated employee simply to finely dice the pile of onions that cover a single pizza. These suckers are chopped up so small that each individual Vidalia gets just slightly—and deliciously—charred. 

The pizza here is, in a word, salty. But it works: the salt lends flavor to the sauce, and the scant cheese layer resurfaces and redeems itself. This saltiness is the hallmark of Midwestern bar pizza, which probably started out as a way for bars to encourage thirsty patrons to drink even more beer (as if the good people of north central Indiana needed a reason), and Pizza King will indeed spoil your daily sodium intake. But if you hit the King on the right night—weekends tend to be more consistent than weeknights—it’s a pretty unique pizza-eating experience.  

And this is where it gets interesting. Apparently, our Pizza King locations are part of the renegade, non-corporate Pizza King cartel, so if you Google “Pizza King” and “Indiana,” you’ll find a bewildering array of restaurants called “Pizza King” from New Castle to Hartford City. It’s as though sixty years ago they’d sign over a franchise with every premium fill-up, and the only requirements were that you had a dumpy first name and you promised it would figure prominently on your new business. 

So today we have “Fred’s Pizza King,” “Marty’s Pizza King,” and no doubt a whole slew of others dotting the cornfields of central Indiana, many of which are unaffiliated with either Pizza King, Inc.—a company based in Muncie that uses the slogans “Good to the Very Edge!” and “Ring the King”—or Pizza King of Lafayette, which doesn't seem to use any slogans at all. These franchises, in turn, are all distinct from the truly remarkable Cassano’s Pizza King of Kettering, Ohio. 

And all of these are distinct from Danish filmmaker Ole Christian Madsen’s 1999 short film Pizza King. Ah, the wonders of Wikipedia.

However, there are two Pizza Kings in Kokomo, and local lore holds that they're different. The two share a Facebook page, but (of course) neither has a website where we might validate this information. Seems we'll just have to find out for ourselves.

Stay tuned . . .

Mulligan's Pub

Few people know this, but there's a green olive war raging near the intersection of Home and Markland Avenues. We thought Ned's was the Green Olive King. We were mistaken.

Let's back up for a moment and introduce you to Mulligan's Pub. Like most Kokomo watering holes, this one is across the street from a blown-out factory, and it's positively overflowing with Hoosier pride. Mulligan's boasts a lively concert calendar and one of the best patios in the City. (Ashley would like us all to take a moment here and try to remember how beautiful it is to day-drink on a sunny summer patio . . . okay, carry on.)

In addition to their sprawling, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink menu, Mulligan's also offers a newly-smoke free dining room and bar area with massive flat screen TVs. We visited the day after a Colts' playoff loss and were happy to help drain some leftover (discounted!) blue Bud Light. (Unfortunately, it still tasted like Bud Light.)

Our Sunday visit was not an accident. Mulligan's offers 4 dollars off any 12" or 16" pizza on the Sabbath and a half-priced 16" pizza on Mondays. 

If we're being totally honest, this pizza didn't exactly melt our minds at first; it's really more of a slow burn sort of thing that starts out rather unobtrusively before building to a taste crescendo. Well, as unobtrusive as whole green olives on a pizza can be. That's right, whole green olives. We may be guilty of creating drama here, but could this be a shot across the proverbial bow of Ned's olive-dominated mess of a pizza? The two bars are less than three blocks apart, after all. 

It's a bar pizza, you think, as you shovel square after square into your mouth. Then--somehow, magically perhaps, with the uninhibited tenacity of a half-soused barroom queen--it sinks its claws into you and doesn't let go for love, money, or much else. 

The sauce is light and tangy, with--as you can plainly see in this photo--a veritable garbage dump of tasty toppings. The cheese on the Mulligan's veggie pizza is pretty much your standard-issue Kokomo mozzarella, but like any pizza-serving establishment worth its salty crust, they make damn sure to give you three full pounds of it.* 

(*This might be a slight exaggeration.)  

The crust is the loser of this pie. It's not that the crust is bad, because it isn't. It's just not special, either; best we can tell, the crust at Mulligan's is a frozen food service crust, and as we all know, nothing that comes from Sysco or Monarch is supposed to have any taste whatsoever. Tastelessness is like their brand image or something. 

By the time we had eaten our fill at the bar, we knew we had stumbled upon something special, but the real test came the next day when Paul took a couple slices to work (cold, of course) and soon realized the strange and fascinating power of the Mulligan's pie. 

It's delicious, it's deliberate, and it's cheap. This was our first pizza at Mulligan's, but it won't be our last. And we'll sure as hell be sitting on that patio devouring one, come the first warm day of Spring. See you there, Hoosiers. 

Ned's Corner Pub

One mile and four decades down the Industrial Heritage Trail from downtown Kokomo sits the incomparable Ned’s Corner Pub. Nestled in an aging but still (half-) thriving business district on South Main, Ned’s humble exterior doesn’t exactly give the impression that the bar serves up some of the best pizza in the City. But, you know, books and covers and all that.  

Before we talk about the pizza, a few words are in order concerning the unique dining experience you’ll find at Ned’s. The interior of the bar is about as unpretentious and laid back as a Midwestern basement, and it's full of amazing artifacts from the last 40 years. There’s a shuffleboard and a jukebox and retro-beer can wallpaper. You can smoke in Ned’s, too, and most people do (a lot), yet somehow the wafting smoke is more authentic than annoying. Beers in this dive aren’t exactly cheap, but the vibe is relaxed and undeniably working-class.

Ned’s is the kind of place where Chrysler Men take their old ladies for a tenderloin on Thursday night. People leave you alone here, but the strong communal atmosphere present in many of Kokomo's best beer joints is perhaps felt most strongly at the Corner Pub. 

Ned’s would be our favorite bar in town even if they didn’t serve unbelievably tasty pizza. Lucky for us, they do. 

We've dined in at Ned's countless times, but the threat of snow and sub-zero temperatures convinced us to order carry-out this time. While we missed the camaraderie and second-hand smoke of the Pub, of course, the pizza was just as good in our own dining room. 

It's difficult to know how to begin describing Ned's pizza. This pizza is complex. In a town where ordering a veggie pizza can sometimes feel like a consolation prize, the veggie at Ned's is like a dizzying stroll through the garden (but that could just be the MGD). 

The stars of this pizza are most definitely the toppings. Onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, green peppers, black olives and green olives. Not just any green olives, either. These green olives are stuffed with what seem to be candied pimentos. It's almost a little weird . . . until you taste it. 

The award for Best Supporting Actor goes to the crust, hands down. Ned's crust is somehow crispy in the middle and chewy around the edges. Its earthy, floury character tastes like a loaf from a Parisian oven or Amish bakery, in any case not a bar on Markland Ave. 

As for the cheese and sauce, they do their jobs with little fanfare. The sauce is sweet and there's enough cheese to be chewy. The whole thing is cut into squares like any respectable Midwestern bar pizza.

The pizza from Ned's, much like the Pub itself, is special. This place is more than a bar in Kokomo. It is Kokomo. Blue-collar humility at first glance, and something kind of exceptional upon closer inspection.

Ned's Corner Pub has the pizza to beat in Kokomo (for now).