Blast from the Past: Gondola Pizza

Hated the place but it was popular with some school mates. Here it’s a pizza joint going back to your author’s formative teen years, when dinosaurs ruled the earth*. And in outward appearance at least it hasn’t changed one bit…until recently that is when it went out of business. It’s Gondola “Incomparable” (Mezzopane) Pizza, open some thirty five plus years in 2017 when the attached photo was snapped, but gone soon after. It was found in the community of Killarney-Glengarry, Southwest Calgary, your author’s sometimes stomping grounds back then.

Always thought it dog food, but recall it being cheap and with their commercial endlessly blaring on the radio, they became quite popular in spite of any shortcomings. The power of marketing. “Gondola Pizza…our pizza can’t be beatsa! When you put it all together, it’s incomparable.” Or some such jingle, played day and night ad nauseum on CKXL.

And now it’s gone, having been replaced by a trendy pizza “boutique”. House rules…no plaid, no man-bun, no “analogue” camera around your neck, no service. It’s called “Baked 3.14” (get it, Pi) a business that certainly goes down as the most minimalist place on the planet when it comes to design and decor. There’s a real Soviet prison block vibe going on here which I guess is a thing. But I hear the eats are good and that’s where it counts. Warning, prepare yourself for sticker shock.

There used to be good number of other Gondola Pizza outlets in Calgary with a couple still remaining even after the closure of this one. Interestingly there’s a chain in Manitoba that uses the same name and an almost identical logo. They two must have been connected at some point.

And here we see in this most unremarkable photo, their sign dating back to the early 1980s. Table games? While waiting for your pie to be thawed and microwaved, I mean hand made and baked, you could partake in a “cocktail cabinet” version of Pacman, Berzerk or Gorf. “Intruder alert!” “Bad move space cadet!” Back then, arcade games were everywhere. Haven’t returned since them days. Not sure if the product improved over the years, but that it shut down suggests probably not. I always thought a McCain’s frozen was a step up. Still, Gondola was a blast from the past. I see the website is still up.

Mezzopane (correctly Mezzo pane, Italian): Half bread, in reference to the style of thin crust pizza served here.

*And by dinosaurs we mean hulking Chrysler Cordobas and Oldmobile 88s. These memories go back to circa 1980-1982.

Something totally unrelated…
Hanna Roundhouse Revisited.

Short Subjects: reports that for any number of reasons are brief in nature. They might be updates to older articles, previews of posts planned or not yet published, brief snippets of things that don’t fit in anywhere else or subjects that are so obscure that information on them can’t be found. Or sometimes we just ramble on about Lord knows what.

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Date of adventure: September, 2017.
Location: Calgary, Alberta.

Gondola Pizza SW Calgary, unchanged since the ’80s.