Pastarrific

Cabin fever is real. And here we mean real-life, hardass Midwestern cabin fever, not some dopey Southerner’s idea of a cold day in Alpharetta (“I know, brother, it got down to like 42 degrees last night!”). It's really real. And it sucks.

Authentic cabin fever, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is an “American colloquialism” (of course) that refers to feelings of “lassitude, restlessness, irritability, or aggressiveness resulting from being confined for too long with few or no companions.” Leave it to the British to suck the marrow right out of a good euphemism, but anyone who’s ever seen The Shining knows exactly what cabin fever feels like, and no, Kubrick wasn't exaggerating.

Hi there!

Cabin fever makes you feel as though your normal worries and concerns don’t matter, only not in a groovy, Matthew McConaughey sort of way, but in more of a chain-smoke-cigarettes-in-your-underwear-and-yell-at-the-TV funk of total and complete helplessness. But wait, even that makes it sound kind of fun, or at least “quirky,” and that’s definitely not what we want to convey. Let’s put it this way: luxuries like good health, psychological well-being, and goal-oriented behavior become totally secondary to the slow, painful sap that is your soul—your soul—leaving your body, with every snowy, shitty day that goes by.

We could continue in this vein. School and work, for example, cease to be the primary focus of your life as your grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous and you drift into a semi-conscious reverie of Netflix binging and rotgut booze. But the point has probably been made. Cabin fever is real, just as real as Satan, and once it gets its claws in you, it takes some doing to get them back out.

These guys get it. Look how warm it is there!

That’s why it’s so damned important to have good friends and good pizza. Mix liberally. Repeat.

In the spirit of getting out of the house, which (just to reiterate) is tough when the high is only 9 degrees (9!), we sloughed off our sweats and tees, put on some deodorant, and met our good friends Matt and Jess at Kokomo’s premiere Italian-themed food emporium: the aptly-named Pastarrific. No, that’s not a typo. Yes, the name screams “Look Ma! I bought a restaurant!” (Our solemn pledge to you, patient reader goofing off on your employer’s time: no more cheap shots at the name of the joint, that’s just hack writing, even for a pizza blog.)

Pastarrific serves up a wide array of tasty brick-oven pies, from their South Side Margherita to the Washington Street, a plum tomato sauce pizza with Chicago sweet fennel sausage, old world pepperoni, and ‘shrooms. Ash opted for a little pesto-basil number called the Neighborhood Pesto pizza, a nice hat-tip to the aforementioned significance of community, while Paul opted for a simple mozzarella, provolone, and wild mushroom.

Another benefit to dragging your friends out for pizza? You get to . . . watch them eat meat. That’s right, our partners in crime loved their meat-lovers’ mess, a perfectly good pizza until someone dumped a pile of pig flesh on it, what you carnivores call “sausage and pepperoni.”

The crust on these pies is really something special: thin, yes, but also substantial in a way that will probably surprise you. Ditto for the plum tomato sauce, which is sweet and savory in just the right ratio. Brick-oven pizza, of course, is pizza in a category of its own (some would say it is its own reward, too), and if you’re a fan of that lightly-darkened burn on the bottom side of your crust, this pizza will not disappoint.

Toppings are generous and slightly more interesting than your standard Sysco fare: you can go with one of the cute signature pies, each one named after a Kokomo neighborhood or main boulevard, or you can go “free style” and add such novelties as caramelized onion and “old world” pepperoni. (That’s right, there’s even throwback meat now. What a time to be alive.)

The US 31 Buffalo Chicken comes with a side of suburban sprawl.  

What’s also nice about the pizza at Pastarrific is that it’s actually an amazing deal. The Margherita is only eight bucks, and we’re not talking about some dainty little thing, either, but a full-bodied, 12-inch pie that can easily feed two hungry, snow-crazed adults ($6 for one topping on Sundays, takeout only). Our only real complaint concerns the provolone. It appears that all of the pizzas here are prepared with both mozzarella and provolone cheeses, which is fine for probably 97.2% of humans in the free world. But if you want to get fussy about it, provolone is really a sandwich cheese, and its pungency could be interpreted, depending on how strongly you feel about cheese, as either adding a layer of complexity or interfering with the wonderful sauce and toppings.

Pastarrific also boasts a respectable suds menu, too, with some great homegrown brews like Sun King (on draught) and even some harder-to-find labels like Brooklyn Lager (in bottles).

The vibe here is family-upscale. There’s a tinkling piano, and it’s dark, but, you know, in a “safe” and acceptable way. 

And it’s fun, a good place to spend an hour or two with friends before returning to your angry, cabin fever-induced stupor.