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 . . .