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.