If you’re my age, 59, writing a pizzeria profile on a place
called Slice of the 80's, your imagination tends to stroll down the Time Tunnel
(cool show from the 60s, debuted when I was 9). As I was contemplating Slice
owner Adam Matt’s glittering concept pizza palace in Westland, Michigan, just
outside of Detroit, I mentally zoomed back to my formative decade, the 80's,
faster than Kirk’s atoms reassembled on the Enterprise’s transporter deck after beaming up from The Wrath of Kahn.
In addition to Star Trek movies starring the original cast, the
80's were full of meaningful personal milestones and cultural monuments for me:
Graduated from college (barely); got married; joined the Air Force as a writer;
had two children; got divorced; got re-married; had another kid; voted for
President Reagan (after voting for Jimmy Carter the first time); watched the
Challenger explode (wrote about it and cried); went to a Heart concert when
both Wilson sisters were hot; cried again when ET died AND ascended into outer
space; told women in discos that me and my buddy were pilots instead of Air
Force journalists; ate a lot of pizza; and threatened my kids that I’d complete
the third utterance of “Beetlejuice” just to make them squeal in fear that
Michael Keaton’s classic character would materialize in our living room. Trust
me, it was cute, not abusive.
The 80's were many things to me, but movies offered a lose
script for my arrested development. I particularly loved science fiction, war
movies and smart-ass anti-heroes. So Raiders
of the Lost Ark (1981), Blade Runner
(1982), Back to the Future (1985), Platoon (1986), Top Gun (1986) and Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off (1988)) all offered celluloid role models with fast-talking shticks that appealed to an ADD-riddled (before
anyone knew what ADD was) underachieving dreamer.
Adam Matt was born in 1983, the year that the TV series MASH
ended, Microsoft Word debuted and the Jedi made a huge comeback. The still youthful-looking
pizza entrepreneur is an even bigger devote of the 80's than yours truly. But
nobody would confuse Adam for a slacker. Adam grew up digging 80's-kids’ must-haves
He-Man and Fraggle Rock on the tube while testing his digital dexterity on pioneering
gaming platforms with era-defining handles like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. By
contrast, my first video game was Pong. When the high-energy youngster wasn’t
padding his video game scores, he was looking forward to running his own
business when he grew up.
As a new century dawned,
Adam made his confident move toward his semi-charmed kinda pizza life. “I was
19 when I started working at pizza restaurants,” he recalls. “I fell in love with the pizza business.” Adam
also fell head over heels for his wife, Natalie, in a pizzeria where they both worked and, eventually, married. Adam insists there’s no truth to the rumor that the
couple named their first child Peppe.
But he does cop to cutting his teeth delivering pies while radio
wave boogying to his favorite 80's bands Bon Jovi, Aerosmith and Van Halen. He yearned
to fold his passions for pizza and 80's nostalgia into something fresh, hot and
profitable. Like The Red Rocker himself, constitutionally unable to drive 55,
Adam threw caution to the wind and opened Slice of the 80's in 2008, after
cashing in his modest savings on a vacant, former pizza shop. Though he admired
The Gipper, Adam had no intention of tearing down this wall, or any piece of
the 1500-square-foot 80's time capsule-to-be. Today, Slice’s lobby walls enshrine
a way-cool collection of 80’s rock posters, Freddy Kruger-featured action
figures, vintage electric guitars and eclectic 80's bric-a-brac, including Rubic
Cubes and California Raisins. The digital tones of video games punctuate the
happy chatter of customers and the parking lot outside is show floor central for
a madly wrapped delivery fleet of rolling hot rod billboards. Slice of the 80's
is a Motor City mainstay. Social critics have characterized the 80's as a decade
of flash without substance. For the pizzaiolo with two first names, award-winning,
lovingly hand-crafted pizzas made with fresh toppings—ixnay on the canned shrooms—belie any compromise with the quality
gods.
You can read much more about how Adam Matt and Slice of the
80's beat the odds as a growing independent in Detroit’s chain-dominated pizza marketplace
in the April issue of PMQ Pizza Magazine, coming soon.
Meanwhile, consider an amazing, marvelous decade—one powerful,
dynamic and interesting enough to support a pizzeria nostalgia theme and the
biggest hair since the first Queen Elizabeth donned a frizzy wig. That’s the decade in which I became a man and
Adam Matt became a gleam in his father’s eye.
And one last irony of my infatuation with 80's flicks: After Full Metal Jacket came out in 1987, I finally
fully understood why Stanley Kubrick is my all-time favorite director. Yes, he
made 2001 and Strangeglove, but he also made it possible for me and my Air Force
buddy to tell chicks in bars—and sometimes supermarkets—“We’d like to buy you a
drink—we’re military journalists.”
Anyone get that reference? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
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