There was a time when pizza was a glorified side dish

The new pizzeria on the Country Club Plaza, Coal Vines Pizza & Wine Bar — this week’s Cafe review — made me wonder how many Fat City readers can remember the first time they ever tasted pizza in a restaurant?

I can, because I remember — and I was a child of the 1960s — how different a hot, bubbling restaurant pizza tasted compared with the frozen discs or the Chef Boyardee “pizza mix” that my mother would bake at home. There wasn’t such a thing as “gourmet” pizza in those days. In fact, many Midwestern Italian restaurants offered their pizza not as the main event but as something more like a side dish, something to eat with lasagna, garlic-broiled steaks or pan-fried chicken.