What We've Learned In The REAL Pizza Wars

Midway through Round 2 in the Pizza Cup (you can vote here until noon on Monday), we pause to take stock of what we’ve learned so far.

What's in a name?
Our random draw in the Round of 32 inadvertently pitted two mortal enemies against one another: Pass By Bar and Hutong Pizza. According to legal documents sent to our office by Pass By's lawyer, Pass By has applied for and received an official trademark for the term "Hutong Pizza" which is one of Pass By's signature pizzas (featuring chunks of lamb a la Beijing's ubiquitous chuan’r).

The lawyer's letter requested that we cease to refer to Hutong Pizza as Hutong Pizza, and we make it clear to our readers that Pass By Bar owns the trademark.

We took it upon ourselves to search China's Trademark database and indeed found that Pass By holds the following trademark:

Some ancient history: the trademark was applied for in April 2004, and by that time Pass By had indeed been serving a pizza on their menu referred to as the "Hutong Pizza" – but it's also worth adding that the trademark was filed for at least seven months after Hutong Pizza the restaurant was in operation (as is evidenced by this "What's New" writeup from our October 2003 issue:

China's trademark laws are notoriously finicky, so much so that in legalese you could envision this as both a trademark infringement or nothing of the sort. To boot:

• The brand image of Hutong Pizza is not similar to the Pass By trademark;
• Pass By appears to have registered "Hu Tong Pizza", while Hutong Pizza uses "Hutong" as one word;
• Pass By uses the simplified characters for hutong (胡同) while Hutong Pizza other uses one of the traditional forms of the same word (衚衕).

We tried rousing Hutong Pizza for comment, but after leaving messages, we did not hear back from them before this post was due to go live.

We really don't know who's right in this situation, but we're going to go with "the one who has threatened us with a lawsuit" and hereby declare that the place who you all know as Hutong Pizza is not "officially" Hutong Pizza, as Pass By Bar owns the trademark. We hereby request you, our humble readers, to hereby refer to Hutong Pizza as "The Place Formerly (and actually quite currently) Known as Hutong Pizza Who According to Documents Provided by a Lawyer Is Using a Name of Pass By Bar's Signature Dish" or TPFAQCKAHPWATDPBALIUANOPBBSD for short. We're open to other suggestions – please add them to in the comments section below. Thus far the folks at TPFAQCKAHPWATDPBALIUANOPBBSD have not told us how they’d prefer to be referred to.

Whose pizza?
Several restaurant owners apparently do not recognize their own pizzas. When competition began, we fielded several angry phone calls from pizzerias complaining, "That's not my pizza in the photograph!" Even after we confirmed with our intrepid Pizza Wars correspondents that yes, all the pizzas depicted in the photos were correctly matched to the restaurants that had produced them, some restaurateurs were still not convinced and clamored to supply us with photographs of their own. We’ve got no beef with people who want their food to be seen in a perfect light but, dear owners, you really should be familiar with what your pizza looks like outside of a photo studio.

You can have an Italian restaurant and not serve pizza
Much to our embarrassment, we learned one of our original nominees in the field of 32, the well-regarded Metro Café, doesn’t actually serve pizza at all. Its name came up due to its excellent reputation for Italian food, but not too long before the opening of the first round, we learned that pizza is nowhere to be found on the menu. You should all go there to check out Metro's excellent homemade pasta, intimate environs and personable service. (Just don't try to order a large pepperoni.)

Holy mother of god, we’ve got some pizza hogs on our hands
Our first round polled our users on their dining habits. We discovered the average respondent to The Beijinger Pizza Cup ordered pizza eight times a month. These same users report that they dine out on average 24 times a month, meaning pizza is their food of choice a full 33% of the time.

Now presuming you have two slices and a glass of beer at each of these pizza experiences, that’s 506 calories a pop.

But we all know that except for the occasional anorexic dining partner, no one ever stops at two slices, so let’s say four slices (and two beers to wash them down), and we get a calorie count of 1012 per meal. Multiply that by eight such meals in an average month, and that adds up to 8,096 calories on pizza meals per month. No matter – that’s easily enough burned off by 13 hours on the elliptical trainer, 46 hours of Wii Golf, 26 hours of belly dancing or 38 hours of brisk walking each month (No word yet on how many Heyrobics sessions you'd need to burn those calories off).

We’ll leave you on a more positive note with this website, which extols pizza as the perfect diet food:

"Pizza is one of the healthiest foods on the planet. There are many reasons for this:

• The bleached flour in the crust sucks up all the grease that drips down from the toppings, trapping it so you don't see it while you're eating. If you don't see it when you eat it, it has no calories.
• It's round (stay with me here). Because square-shaped foods have corners, they contain a lot more calories than round foods. To save even more calories, cut a hole in the center of the pizza (refer back to #1 for full details).
• The cheese on the pizza is loaded with calcium – even more than the Tums you're going to need after eating the whole thing.
• You can easily reduce your servings without sacrificing enjoyment. Instead of cutting the pizza into 8 slices, try cutting it into only 4. You've just eaten HALF the number of slices you ate before! Imagine how many calories you'll save by doing that!
• Vegetables covered in grease are still vegetables. Never mind that all the nutrition has been baked out of them, you're still getting you're [sic] recommended daily servings of veggies.
• There is plenty of fiber in the paper that's stuck to the bottom of the pizza. Don't be afraid of it."