816 Pint & Slice

Pizza: the wonderfully unique Italian pie traditionally topped with chunked vegetables and a cornucopia of cheeses. The Americanized version of this incredulous appropriate-at-all-times conglomeration-of-the-food pyramid meal has a lesser quantity of ingredients but more of them. The crust, browned in a high temperature oven; the sauce, rich enough to add flavor but not enough to overpower the taste and drip off of the slice onto your shirt; the cheese, melted but with a consistency appropriate of other melted toppings. Nothing dismantles the soul quicker than taking off a slice’s entire cheesy roof with the first bite. The regionalist nature of pizzerias can turn many enthusiasts against each other. The New Yorkers love their thin slices with minimal toppings, while the Chicagoans love thick slices with the sauce on top of the traditional toppings. Californians love their chain pizzerias that produce unoriginal thick New York-style pies, and the Philadelphians love cheese steaks. The grudges are often based more on geographical loyalties and rivalries than who actually has produces the best pizza, but the differences do create a diverse environment for the enthusiast’s palette. 816 Pint & Slice in downtown Fort Wayne does what any great pizzeria should do: innovate, taking the best parts of the regional ‘za scenes and combining them to create an original pizza, complete with your choice of sauce and two cups of love.

            I visited 816 Pint & Slice in the afternoon on the 10^th of April. My classes were out for the day, and my 18^th birthday was still ripe, so I treated myself to a slice of Fort Wayne’s finest. The trip, made by the sole traveler of my heart, resulted in a slice of pepperoni and ground beef, majestically prepared to universal acclaim. When I arrived, the clock was nearing 2:30 in the afternoon, and only three others occupied the sitting area. The only pizza they had prepared at the moment was a pepperoni, but they added some ground beef, one of my favorite toppings, onto my slice at no extra charge. My pizza was ready only a few moments later. The slice itself combines the width of New York slices, the flavor intensity of Chicago slices, and the height and thickness of what most people consider a generic pizza. The oven-cooked royalty in front of me reminded me why I keep coming back. It’s a messier slice than most, but the mess is one that slowly melts and is by all means manageable with a fork and a few serviettes. I am normally one to scoff at the very idea of using a fork to eat pizza. A spoon is occasionally acceptable on grounds of humor, but forks are too practical, and too many pizzerias whose pies call for forks trade quality for quantity with their ingredients.

            Nothing particularly negative was taken away from my recent outing. The employees were kind and engaging, and as told in my explanation of the ground beef fiasco, were willing to help create a personal pizza experience. The atmosphere inside matches the vintage, antiquated look of the building’s exterior. It’s placement on South Calhoun surrounds it with other buildings of similar stature and style, making this hole-in-the-wall joint feel astonishingly inviting. Parking in the alley to the left of the building is far from accommodating the restaurants capacity, but Calhoun is rampant with street parking and garages. The radio lightly played 91.1 WCYT, which happens to be the radio station I work with as assistant music director and as an on-air DJ, so that certainly enhanced my experience. The upper level contains a large room with accommodating seating for private parties. The front of the upper level has a small stage for performing musical acts and a few tall windows looking out over the characteristically ornate street of South Calhoun. I’ve had the pleasure of working with 816 Pint & Slice quite a few times over the years with both private parties and eight hour long music festivals, and they’ve always been kind-hearted and understanding of any problems that are prone to happen with having hundreds attending an event eight hours long. They even allowed four drunken Santa Clauses attend a private party I was performing at, and with the holiday figures raising their Heineken bottles high, we took a photo to remember the occasion.

It’d been four months since my last foray into 816 Pint & Slice, but I’ll be making the trip downtown sometime soon to excavate new flavor ideas and identities that I am not yet familiar with. While it is neither socially appropriate nor legal to serve minors pints, it certainly is socially appropriate and legal to serve slices, so for the foreseeable future, many lunches will be consumed and many pleasantries exchanged with those whom inhabit the brick and mortar building at 816 South Calhoun Street. What it lacks in parking accommodations it makes up for in uniquely brilliant flavors and a warm, inviting, and genuine atmosphere. Existential disbelief absorbs you, as it does humanity, until you revel within this spectacular pizza.