The fast-paced world of selling pizza
Maria Canton
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Mar 23/01) - It seems Yellowknifers are meat-eaters -- at least according to Boston Pizza's kitchen manager Nhan Do says the meatlovers pizza is the most frequently ordered pizza pie at the popular downtown pseudo-Italian food eatery.
And appropriately, it's his favourite to make.
"We usually sell between 10-15 meatlovers a night," said Do. "My favourite pizza to make is also the meatlovers, because it's fast and easy."
Efficiency would be the name of the game when you're dealing with 112.5 kg (250 pounds) of pizza dough a day.
That translates into anywhere from 60 to 75 pizzas travelling through an automatic pizza oven at 500 C for exactly seven minutes every single day -- just like clockwork.
"It's a lot of pizza and strangely, I'd say our second most popular pizza is the vegetarian."
From one extreme to the other, just like Do, who went from two years of cooking in the hot and very busy kitchen, to kitchen manager in a climate-controlled office with a stacks of paperwork.
"I do all the food orders and manage the kitchen staff and make sure everything is prepped and ready in the kitchen," he said.
"I do miss cooking because it is so busy and fast."
When filling out the food orders for the restaurant, Do says chicken wings win hands down as the food he has to get shipped up the most often.
He orders 30 cases every week at 100 wings per case. That's 3,000 wings eaten every seven days or 430 wings a day.
Having never overdosed on pizza, Do says he didn't really even eat a lot of pizza before he started working at Boston Pizza.
"I'm from Vietnam and we don't even have pizza there. When I make my own pizzas I load them up with spices and make them hot -- hot sauce, chilies, banana peppers," he said.
"Sometimes I get tired of eating pizza, but not very often. I do like it when we have a special, then I like to try that."
And as for the standard Boston Pizza fare, he says the tropical chicken is his pizza of choice.
