I have been living in Pattaya five years straight with only two visits back to the States. Friends and family asked, if I miss America and I answer honestly, “Only my friends, family, and pizza.”
I didn’t tell the ranking shifts depending on time of day, because there’s nothing better than a pizza after a long night of beer guzzling no matter where you are in the world.
In 1996 I was teaching English to reincarnated monks, workers, factory girls, and children in Lhasa Tibet. fast food was a bowl on Yak meat and noodles. The yak meat still had hair on the meat. Two French telecommunication workers were staying next to me at the Snowlands Hotel. We ruminated every evening about food, concocting favorite meals like starving gulag prisoners. They extolled the virtues of Rochefort cheese, the crack of a good baguette, and Cote du Rhone. I agree with them, even though my choice of a first meal after a last-meal existence was pizza.
Pepperoni and cheese with tomato sauce.
The nearest pizza was in Kathmandu and we coordinated our departure to travel together over the Himalayas to the Nepali capitol. We got rooms at the Shakti Hotel and argued about Coq au Vin at the Yeti Hotel or pizza. I won the argument with the WWI quote, “Lafayette, we are here to eat pizza.”
The pizza sucked as did all pizza in Asia during the 20th Century and even wrose was that of the two major chains along Pattaya’s Beach Road. Both mass-production outlets produced a pie was topped with a communion wafer-thin offering of pseudo-cheese floating on peppery ketchup. The crust was harder than a hockey puck and the extra toppings had been spewed from a Star Trek food processor. I stopped eating pizza entirely, until a friend told me about Scoby’s Pizza on 3rd Road.
“It’s good.”
The Convict was Aussie and what the hell do Antipodeans know about pizza or any food other than BBQed Kangaroo tails. However I was proven wrong. The pizza was good that within a week a stack of Scoby pizza boxes were piled in my trash.
And the small pepperoni pizza was only 115 Baht.
Scoby had been trying to run a bar without any success. In fact he was going bust when he saw a pizza oven for sale. 12,000 baht.
Another pizza maker gave him a recipe and the rest is history.
Scoby’s is close to the Buffalo Bar and there’s nothing like eating greasy pizza and drinking cold beer with available girls of every shape, age, and demeanor, especially after closing since Scoby’s stays open to 3am.
Ain’t nothing in New York like that. Not in 2008
Scoby Pizza 038-720752 340-16 3rd Road Pattaya
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