- Aimee Levitt
- A Blaze pizza in all its glory
The fast-casual pizza was conceived, the legend goes, the fateful day in 2011 when Wetzel’s Pretzels owners Rick and Elise Wetzel wanted a quick pizza for lunch, but, finding no decent options in Pasadena, ended up in the burrito assembly line at their local Chipotle. So quick! So efficient! Why, they wondered, couldn’t there be a Chipotle of pizzas?
Once your pizza is assembled—the workers behind the counter apply toppings with care and parsimony so that once the pizza’s cut, there will be a single piece of sausage on every slice—it goes into a “blazing-hot oven” (temperature unspecified) for 180 seconds. Presumably that sounds faster than “three minutes.” Anyway, the idea is that you’ll end up with a Neapolitan-style pie with a very thin, blistered crust. And if the line is short and if you eat fast, you’ll be in and out of Blaze in the same amount of time it takes to heat up a Tombstone.
