Papa's Restaurant: Indiana's Best Pizza* (Culver, Indiana)

From Thanksgiving until early spring, the heat in my Toyota was on the fritz. The fan blew cold air, yes, but that's literally cold comfort when the wind blows single-digits through the sheet metal and you're stuck halfway down a snowbank in Culver, Indiana.

Here's an artist's rendering of what that might have looked like, with a few mountains thrown in for effect:

And a brief sampling of what horrors could have resulted. . .

Thankfully, everything worked out just fine. Over time, I gradually extricated myself from danger using a timely Austin Powers-maneuver, as seen in the following video.

Culver is a tiny lakeside village just an hour due north of Kokomo. Founded in 1843 as Geneva, Indiana, Culver today boasts a well-known military academy and boarding school, a gorgeous lake what they call "Maxinkuckee," and some terrific trail running.

An eclectic mix of folks call this area home, including blood-in-the-soil Hoosiers, a delightful cadre of displaced PhDs from all over the map, and of course the adolescent children of Chicagoland's and northwest Indiana's 1%-ers (as in the ultra-rich, not outlaw biker gangs). The latter is the demographic really keeping the tiny economic four-banger of this little village chugging along. But I've yet to find a quainter place in Indiana than Culver, and the easy, genial manner of the people here is a pleasant change of pace.

Lake Maxinkuckee in winter. 

For instance, the exchange I had when I walked through the door of Papa's Restaurant could have taken a different turn altogether in Kokomo.

"Hi there, welcome to Papa's." A cheery older waitress comes out of a crouch just behind the bar and greets me as I struggle with my massive overcoat.

"Hi!" I reply. The restaurant is nearly-deserted, so I take a seat at the nearest booth.

"And will it be a man or a woman this evening?" She's coming at me with two menus in hand. I'm fairly certain I know what she means, but I figure I might as well have a little fun and monkeywrench the whole thing. It's been that kind of night.

"I'm sorry," I say, surprised at how genuine I sound."Are you propositioning me?"

The bartender has been standing just 10 feet away the whole time, keeping an eye on things in that hawkish, slightly bored way some bartenders have. Out of my periphery, I see him do one of those sputtering, hand-over-mouth laughs that shatters the tension like an icepick. Then the waitress laughs.

We all laugh. I feel relief.

The guitars are junk, but those jeans belonged to Lemmy Kilmister. 

Papa's Restaurant, as much an institution in Culver as the lakeside hot dog stand or the Huffington Library (not Arianna, but her ex-husband Michael—more on this below), claims to have "the best pizza in Indiana." And any pizza restaurant expressing that level of hubris is just begging for a visit and perhaps even a joke about the world's oldest profession.

Indianasbestpizza.com

I'll start with the basics: from time to time, I have written about what I call the "ideal Indiana-style pizza." Veteran readers may recall that Ned's in Kokomo has long held the unofficial title of best Indiana-style pizza. But Papa's is a serious contender for that honor, if not the outright winner.

What makes an Indiana-style pizza? There are variations, but here are the key features: mountains of mozzarella cheese, a crust that sits somewhere on the plane between thin and hand-tossed—with a light char around the edges, and a recognition that olives are meant to be eaten whole, especially on a pizza.

Just kidding about the third one, folks. Actually, the final key feature is that the pizza must be cut into square or rectangular slices.

When I was coming of age in the early 1990s, national pizza franchises like Little Caesar's and Domino's had a brief but beautiful flirtation with square-cut pizza, except that these were mostly square pies that had been sliced into even smaller squares. Domino's had "The Dominator," for example, which at 30 inches was touted as being "almost a yard long!" (1 yard = 36 inches, so even 20 years ago, Domino's was full of shit.)

Pizza Hut's BigFoot pizza is another example of this monkey-see, monkey-do phenomenon. Anybody remember BigFoot? Anybody remember Haley Joel Osment? They're both in the following TV ad, which was the first to run just before the series finale of Cheers. Ah, the early '90s. (And now I have effectively confused and alienated any student of mine who might've been reading this blog.)

The bottom-line: a true Indiana-style pizza must be a circular pie cut into squares or rectangles. Why? For one, it's a completely different pizza-eating experience than can be had with "traditional" triangle slices. Smaller squares mean you can eat more slices, which makes a pie go a little farther in a crowd. More importantly, you get to choose your slice (square? rectangle?) based on the crust-to-cheese ratio that really speaks to you. Not a crust person? Eat the slices right out of the middle: they're mostly cheese and toppings. Like more crust? The edge slices are perfect.

Lucky for me, I like 'em both ways. Papa's menu offers a robust selection of vegetarian-friendly specialty pies, including the classic margherita, "Papa's Veggie" (pictured below), and a tasty little off-menu combo I affectionately call "the veggie Hawaiian" (pictured further below).

The veggie Hawaiian. (The pineapples are concealed under the sheer cheesiness of it all.)

Beer in a glass. German writing. Sehr schön.

For some reason, they only cut the large pies into squares, so I suppose anything less than a large is technically not an Indiana-style pizza. That's how important those little squares are.

Pizza isn't the only thing in Culver that's cheesy and slightly overdone, however. There's also the aforementioned Huffington Library.

Named for Michael Huffington, a Culver alumnus and the man who put the "Huffington" in HuffPo, the library boasts his rare book collection, a few personal effects, and a sizeable portfolio of art pieces ranging from tasteful sculptures like this one

to what can only be described as neo-classical softcore.

Mr. Navarro will see you now. 

Yeah. It's that kind of party. 

The Huffington Library is not open to the public, but it's definitely worth a visit, and it's not like there are armed guards at the door or anything. Just show up, dress conservatively, and try not to look like a jackass. I'm sure you'll be fine. After all, now that summer is all-but upon us, I would be remiss if I didn't tout the merits of a quick trip north for a spin around the lake, a tour of the library, and a slice of Papa's ideal Indiana-style pizza.

Grade: B++
This is so close to being an A-, but the teacher in me just can't quite go that high. Not yet, anyway. If Papa's was a student, they'd earn an 89.899%, and they'd be e-mailing and calling me morning, noon, and night to see if there's "any extra credit they can do to get it up to an 'A'...?" The answer would of course be no. (Fairness and all that.)

Class: O.
________________

* This is not necessarily the judgment of *ASOK, but since this rather boastful tagline is, apparently, part of the restaurant's name (cf. website), I leave it here for the sake of accuracy and completeness. To find out what I actually think about the pizza, you must read the review. I should note in passing that the URL for Papa's website is indianasbestpizza.com. Brilliant. Just brilliant.