Mystic Pizza (1988) Shows Us That Pizza is the Perfect Culinary Metaphor

Folks, today’s issue of Dust On The VCR isn’t just a subscriber request. It’s our very first sponsorship! Well, sort of.

Peter Quenelle, a friend of mine for three decades(!), launched a pizza business with his wife Suah in December called Good Pizza Club. It’s a magnificent pop-up concept: They take orders Sunday through Wednesday and then take over Last Call Baking on Friday and Saturday evenings to cook and serve superb pizzas. And I’m here to tell you they’re the real deal. Good Pizza Club does a version of Detroit-style pizza—rectangular shape and caramelized crust, but without the sauce-on-top gimmick—filled with locally sourced ingredients and made-from-scratch sauces. (They do banana pudding too!) I ordered a mushroom pizza last weekend and ate half of it before I got home and it was so good I almost wrecked my car.

To celebrate Birmingham’s latest greatest pizza concept, Peter—a longtime subscriber to this newsletter!—thought that Mystic Pizza would be the perfect film to cover today. Not just because he’s a bona fide pizza chef, but because he’s had a huge crush on Julia Roberts ever since he saw this film at an impressionable age. (I mean, who wouldn’t?)

Now it’s time to hit you with a photo of a beautiful Good Pizza Club pie (I chose the Huntress, which will be my next order) and then hit you with some sincere thoughts about this coming-of-age tale of three pizza servers. (Tell Peter I sent you when you place an order!)

Reader, I was an English major. Which means I think a lot about symbolism. Metaphors are all around us, whether you choose to acknowledge them or not.

And when it comes to food metaphors, I think you can make a pretty good case that pizza is king. Sure, you could do a lot of figurative work with sandwiches, cakes, stews, things of that nature. But at risk of going full creative writing workshop, there’s so much that you can do with pizza.

The four(!) writers of Mystic Pizza know that as well as anyone.* It’s right there in the title. The shared profession of the three protagonists is the secret sauce that elevates this coming-of-age tale above similar fare.

The story revolves around three young women—older sister Daisy, younger sister Kat, and their friend Jo—as they fall in love with three very different types of men. As such, their relationships all follow distinct trajectories. Jo falls in back in love with her blue-collar fisherman fiancé after leaving him at the altar, Daisy grabs the attention of a charming but unemployed trust fund baby, and Kat (still a teenager) becomes infatuated with the ambiguously married man that she’s babysitting for while his wife is away.**

But their stories all orbit around the titular pizza place where they all make their living—as well as the restaurant matron Leona, who loves the young women like her own daughters.

There’s a catch, though: Leona refuses to tell them what’s in the sauce. Though they beg and plead to learn what keeps customers coming back to Mystic Pizza, she only agrees to let them know when it’s time for her to retire. Even a pretentious food critic, host of a popular show called “The Fireside Gourmet,” admits that he can’t identify the blend of spices in this “superb” pizza, which he calls “the best [he’s] ever tasted.”

But Leona isn’t naive enough to think that all—if any—of these ladies will be sticking around that long. Especially as she witnesses a season where all three of them are coming of age in different ways. Even before Daisy’s rich love interest comes along and sweeps her off her feet, she warns her fellow employees that she’s “not gonna be slinging pizza for the rest of [her] life.” (Leona chimes in to correct her without missing a beat: “The best pizza!”)

But this is where the metaphor comes in so expertly. Nobody’s going to teach Jo how to win her man back. Or Daisy how to fix her man after he makes a mistake. Or Kat how to recover from a broken heart. They each have to figure out their own ingredients—their own secret sauce, if you will—before they can become “superb” women.

Mystic Pizza is actually a Russian doll of a metaphor in a way. It’s the title of the film, the name of the restaurant, and also the moniker of the delicious pizza with the mystery ingredients. Sure, it may not be Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, but it’s a potent symbol nonetheless.

So potent, in fact, that the Connecticut town that inspired the story adopted it themselves in a way. Screenwriter Amy Holden Jones was so charmed by the real-life restaurant while summering in Mystic that she made it the focal point of her story about three young waitresses.*** But when it came time to shoot the film, most of the sets were in the neighboring town of Stonington Borough—including a converted home that served as the pizza parlor interiors. After the film became a modest hit, the real-life restaurant was renovated…to resemble the fictional one in the film.

I don’t know if the actual Mystic Pizza that they serve at the actual Mystic Pizza is still a mystery. But life sure is, am I right? So next time you order up a fresh, tasty pizza for lunch or dinner, maybe you’ll think about the ingredients that you’re made of as well.****

*So does whoever wrote that tagline on the poster: “A romantic comedy with the works.” I mean, come on. Chef’s kiss.

**Julie Roberts is adorable here, but it’s Lili Taylor and Vincent D’Onofrio who steal the show as Jo and Bill. Jo gets the most iconic line in the film by way of Bill’s nonsense: “I don’t have to marry an asshole. It’s the 80s.”

***“Summering” is the word Wikipedia uses, not my own choice. You know you’ve made it when “summer” is a verb, folks.

****I won’t judge you if you eat pizza for breakfast too. I’ve been there.

Mystic Pizza is now streaming on Paramount+, Tubi, Hoopla, Pluto TV, and DirecTV, and it is available to rent elsewhere.