On pizza parlors

When was the last time you heard someone refer to a place as a “pizza parlor?” When I was a child, this was a phrase I heard often — maybe in real life, maybe in movies. I’m not quite sure. A “pizza parlor,” as I inferred it, was a type of sit-down restaurant, where the primary dish was pizza — every table had at least one pie on it — with a specific type of decor, for a specific type of audience.

A pizza parlor probably has a black-and-white linoleum floor; it may have wood-paneled walls, but it doesn’t have to. There probably isn’t table service, but there might be. Beer is available for purchase, though wine is less guaranteed and liquor even less so.

Families eat at pizza parlors; these places serve a distinctly 20th-century community-cultural need. The proprietor knows at least 33% of seated customers by name (or at least one person from 33% of the seated parties).

A pizza parlor is working-class. It lacks any pretense. The pizza is decent-to-good but probably not great; the warm hospitality enriches the taste.

Step back for one moment — "parlor." Remove the "pizza" modifier. A parlor is a room in a house used for entertaining, right? After a dinner, a parlor is a place where hosts and guests may retire for a finger of whiskey. Ok. But beyond the domestic, back to the shopping street, there are (or were?) ice cream parlors and beauty parlors — other parloric businesses, surely, that I'm missing.

I found a 2016 blog post authored by one Brad Nixon, riffing on this same topic. We're going to trust his research — he consulted two different dictionaries, and there's something about his author photo that I trust. His pose, "caught" in the act of writing, his sleeves rolled up, his face calm, turned towards the camera in a not-quite natural posture. At the very least, there is a curiosity in his eyes: this guy would be interested in the origins of the parlor.

So, from Brad, we take that parler is one of those English words that came to us from France, meaning "to speak;" Brad explains that "a parlor is a place where people gather to talk."

So it's as simple as that: A pizza parlor is a pizza restaurant where people gather to talk — friends, families. It is a community center where beer is poured by the pitcher, and there is no 90-minute time limit, as has befallen the reservation-required restaurant culture in New York City.

Brad Nixon last updated his blog on July 18, 2023 — "Sir Gawain vs. the Chatbot." Before that, it had been about seven months; before that, one year. His blog was born on November 4, 2009. It feels very much of that era of the internet — it's a WordPress site and looks like one, barebones. Apparently, he, over the years, has built up an audience of 1,352 subscribers. I enjoyed this piece on an old residence of Thomas Pynchon's. It's the site of his most recent activity on the blog, a comment left on November 11, 2023 — 13 years after the article was posted.

As I write this, I've subscribed to Brad's blog. I hope to catch a dispatch from him soon. If you're out there, Brad, keep on talking.

In 15 years, will someone I do not know on the other side of the world or country google "pizza parlor" and read this piece? I should be so lucky. The internet is a place, at its best, where we gather — across distance multidimensional — to speak, if not to eat.