Me-n-Ed’s (pizza place review)

I have been wanting to go to this place since spotting it in August.  It absolutely looks like my idea of a “hub of Langley” so the intrigue was high:

That’s the side patio.  Kind of rinkydink innit, apart from the signage.  A little user-hostile, even.  Cement, bare-bones table/chair sitch, and more cement.  Oof!

I can’t emphasize enough how central this location is to the Langley core (as far as I’ve discerned it).  There is the heavy implication (in my mind) from how it’s holding the spot and how it’s branding itself, that it’s some kind of big deal locally.  I hadn’t known this until like 20 minutes ago but, it’s a chain and there’s more around the GVA (thanks no, I don’t care that it’s called the “metro Van area” or whatever).  That makes it slightly less interesting to me in one sense (hyperlocalized novelty lore) and slightly more in another (broadly-local corporate historicity lore).

Let me lay this on you right here:

The vibe? It’s DEAD. The place? Feels STERILE.

I spent what felt like 10 minutes complaining about how “this is clearly the work of consultants” and “I’m sure it’s very easy to clean” and so forth.

It ain’t exactly Uncle Moe’s, is what I’m saying.  I was disappointed.  I wanted–yearned for–patterned carpet that hasn’t been changed out let alone cleaned since the early 70s, still smelling ever so faintly, yet deliciously, of some barely-remembered, legal, indoor smoking section.  I wanted a pinball machine with attendant pinball wizard who hasn’t moved from Me-n-Ed’s since the early 80s.  I wanted weird Langleyana hanging from the rafters and shown in old photos, old newsclippings. Let me reiterate, I was disappointed.  So that’s the ambiance.  I felt bad for the server who tried to step up the place’s game with good service but I also felt like, if he DID overhear all that, he wasn’t overly ruffled and just took it as a personal challenge to not let the house’s staleness ruin his tip.  (It went well for him. Fair effort/payout evaluation on his part.)

Let’s talk menu-feel:

So I was cheapskating again, and all the prices felt high. I knew I wanted a beer, so I got the daily special (love lager, love a pint) for $8 gladly. That was the majority of my budget right there.  What to eat?

“Tha’ll do.”  I managed to get it with garlic aioli as opposed to ranch or marinara, so, even better.  I cropped the picture like this so I could make this strictly-nominally related Stranglers reference.  That song’s about heroin I suppose but whatever. It could be about toast at a pizza place in Langley if you squint with all your heart.

My gf got the perogi pizza because she’s autistic about being Ukrainian so that was a done deal (I’m whatever I am about “optimal value” so like, we have our own choice-making simplification protocols but we both have protocols; some people don’t, but only some of those people don’t actually need them) and our friend got a pepperoni ‘za with an overly elaborate nickname.

That’s a healthy-sized beer!  My gf’s go-to cola is usually not the smaller vessel, because most drink specials are for sleeves.  A beer fit for a king, a kingly beer indeed.

Nice! Sure! It’s good!  At this point I’m just about buzzed up already so it was hittin’.

Right, so this is “the godfather”…I tradded half a bread for a slice and found it underwhelming.  I could take it or leave it when it comes to warm pepperonis on pizza (more of a pineapple fan 🍍😈🙊) because i prefer it cold as charcuterie.  So this wasn’t really doing it for me.  The piece left over that we saved for breakfast ended up going to me and it was much better cold imo.

Now, I was prepared to not be shared with, so I predicted up til this point that the beer size would be the star of the show for me. Enter, my gf not liking her pizza.

I kind of expected it would have full like, perogis just like, on it, in the way a Brazilian pizza would have.  She was expecting approximately what she got, which was a potato and bacon pizza, but: she was thinking of the (spicy) version Boston Pizza does.  I don’t like Boston Pizza very much, for the record, but I would go there regularly if they just offered the beer boots in something more like this, as an option.

So, she doused it down in parm, but I think this was another pocketsauce situation woefully unforeseen.

Good luck for me though, I thought it was DIVINE.  Just utterly divine.*  She said it was bland and disappointing compared to her expectation (this from lil miz chicken tendies herself) but I thought it was packed rafter-high with all the good salties and smokies from the bacon (rip to the abused animal it was, can we all wake up and smell the meat-is-murder-but-industrial-agribusiness-is-even-worse people? Good fellow countrypeople? My homeslicecicles? Listen to me acting like I’m happy about what farm-to-table offers relative to the frankenfoods I’m familiar with).

*what if when we eat someone, regardless of species, the ghost is there passing judgement on it from within a kind of backseat possession scenario, and it colours our enjoyment.  I suspect it’s actually much easier to get a pig’s blessing for esting it than most other sorts of creatures.  Pigs are smart and tend to be at least somewhat hedonistic as a general tendency if not a universal; they could probably grasp the golden rule of it and appreciate a human’s selfish ignorance in being endpoint consumers of their bodies that got to be “food” via a path of much pain and sorrow that the pigs probably mainly blame the factory people for it because they saw and caused it all directly.  I bet a chicken is more likely to think, I didn’t taste good enough for you to necessitate and therefore ultimately cause my life in a box to happen and suck so you aren’t really enjoying this food right now.

Anyway the potatoes were so appealing to me for their delightful podginess, I love a nice mushy starch component with my cheeses and smoked meats.  I would call this a loaded baked potato pizza, I think.  Probably it wouldn’t sell as well–I’m sure that was consumer-tested for by Boston Pizza, at least.

I dumped my leftover aioli on the pizza after a couple slices and saved the final three for the next day.

Hello, the box.  I grok what you’re trying to tell me. But, no. See, I only do that with pizza I think will soften with heat (eg very oily pizza, and, crucially, I want it microwaved instead of baked).  I didn’t reheat it although it got hard overnight in a cold room, but it softened up in my gf’s car by the afternoon, which was its ideal state, IMO.

The crust wasn’t my fave at any point, it was a little soda-crackery:

So like make of all that what you will, I know what pizza I would get again (if I’m accepting that there is for sure no such thing as a vegetarian purchase at a nonvegetarian establishment) but I myself wouldn’t suggest eating in (or picking up from) here again.  Just not my kind of a place overall.  I’d rather try other, different local pizza places until I find one that’s more interesting.

Now I know!

Good pint!

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