What kind of a person would eat pizza from a vending machine?
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Rising up, oddly out of place like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a white and red rectangular pizza vending machine sits on the sidewalk outside an apartment building on a busy stretch of Georgia Avenue in downtown Silver Spring. Roughly 10 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 8 feet high, the 24-7 automated pizzeria features a covered foyer (in the most generous sense of the word) with a touchscreen for ordering. I live nearby and walk by it all the time. I’ve always wondered if the pizza billed as “authentic” and “artisanal” tastes any good.
The mechanized shop is the work of Canadian company PizzaForno, whose machines can be found across Canada and the U.S. (there’s also one in Mexico). They aren’t the only ones making pizza vending machines: Let’s Pizza, API Tech, and others do as well. You can even buy your own on Amazon for a little more than $11,000.
One sunny day in early April, I finally gave in to my curiosity. To bring a professional perspective to bear, I brought along award-winning chef Amy Brandwein, who owns CityCenterDC’s acclaimed Italian restaurant Centrolina and the casual cafe Piccolina across the way, where she serves nicely blistered pizzas cooked in a wood-fired oven.
Pizza is the reason Brandwein pursued a culinary career. In the mid-1990s, she was working in politics, but her real joy was cooking pizzas with her father. The more she did it, the more she became convinced it was her calling. Hoping to learn the foundations of Italian cuisine, she took a job working for Roberto Donna at his celebrated (but now-closed) restaurant Galileo. Eventually, she moved to another one of his restaurants, Bebo Trattoria in Crystal City, which had a wood-fired oven where she learned how to make Neapolitan-style pizza. She honed her pizzaiolo skills further when she was the chef at now-shuttered Casa Nonna in Dupont Circle, which featured an array of Neapolitan-minded pizzas.
When Brandwein joined me for the taste test, she brought a positive mindset. “I want to try it; it looks fun,” she said gamely while surveying the pictures on the outside of the machine. “It could be good.”
On a scale of 1 to 10—with Little Caesars and Papa Johns at the bottom and Brandwein’s favorites Bar del Monte and Etto at the top—she was expecting PizzaForno to be a 5.
I coughed up $13.77 for the vegetarian option—it costs a dollar extra to be delivered hot rather than frozen.
We heard the sound of mechanical clanking and whirring inside the contraption, and Brandwein asked if I smelled something. “I think that’s just the decay of Western civilization,” I said.
About three minutes later, a small rectangular metal flap at waist height opened. “Please collect your product,” a message on the screen prompted.
I bent down and retrieved the product, erm, pizza, which somehow managed to be both a circle and a square. About a foot wide with a relatively thin crust, its cheese was overly browned, and the various vegetables—black olives, red peppers, white onions, mushrooms—looked like they had been sitting in a tanning bed for too long.
“That’s not a pizza I’d want to eat,” said Brandwein, shrinking away. “I don’t want all those strong things on a pizza.”
“I think it might be the booty call of pizzas,” I offered, trying to reinject some positivity into our outlook. “No one would want to be seen with it in daylight during normal working hours. But at night, after a couple of drinks, bring it on.”
The pizza didn’t come with napkins or a knife, both necessities. I could only imagine the revelers who might buy these pies, tearing them apart with their hands, covered in sauce and cheese.
We sourced a plastic knife and napkins from a nearby deli, and thankfully the thin, white bread-like crust cut easily. We each chose a slice, took a bite, and I immediately regretted pitching this story. The pizza sauce was too sweet; the vegetables tasted of nothing; the cheese was an overbaked grease cape; the sugary, soggy crust had the flavor and consistency of off-brand Wonder Bread left on the counter on a humid day.
Brandwein had a similar reaction. “It’s worse than Little Caesars,” she said. “This is gross. And would it have killed them to put some basil on there, maybe underneath the cheese or something to protect it?”
Her score: -1.
She guesses that the ingredients cost about $2, making my $13.77 total feel even more shameful.
“Lunch at McDonald’s costs almost just as much, but it’s very good for what it is,” she said.
Brandwein charges between $17–$20 for a similar-size pizza at Piccolina with better ingredients (including prosciutto and spicy soppressata) and better execution (done by humans, not robots).
But in the interest of journalism or self-loathing, we decided to order a second pizza, opting this time for pepperoni.
The machine cranked to life again, and out popped the pie. “Wow,” Brandwein said.
It wasn’t a good “wow.” Only a single pepperoni looked as if it was properly crisped; the others were shrouded by cheese and undercooked. We reluctantly took a nibble.
“It’s better than the vegetarian,” Brandwein conceded, but not by much.
Her score: 1
I’m not sure I could even give it a point. Even after only a couple of bites, my gut biome was not happy with me. Brandwein says her tummy wasn’t pleased either.
Would she ever eat it again? “Not if I can help it,” she said.
As we were talking, a passerby inquired about the pizza. “Would you like to try a slice?” I asked.
He demurred, possibly taking cues from our wincing and the fact that the table next to us was littered with mostly uneaten vending machine pizza. “I walk by it every day and I’ve always been curious, but I’ve never ordered it.”
Ultimately, he made the wisest choice. I should have tamped down my curiosity and just kept walking.
PizzaForno, 8750 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring. pizzaforno.com