The Untold Truth Of Chuck E. Cheese Pizza

Chuck E. Cheese is one restaurant that's all about the experience. Whether it's a good one of childhood fun (video games! skee ball! prizes! giant singing rats!) or an adult nightmare (screaming kids! sensory overload! giant singing rats!), probably the least memorable thing about Chuck E. Cheese is its food. In fact, what kind of food do they even serve there? Birthday cake? Well, yes, but they do offer a full menu, as well, since Chuck E. Cheese is actually a restaurant as well as an entertainment center.

While they do offer such snack foods as wings, mozzarella sticks, and pretzel bites as well as desserts including churros (unicorn ones, of course) and Dippin' Dots (of course) and kid-sized servings of chicken nuggets and subs, they really offer only one type of main dish, that being pizza. Well, unless you count the salad bar, but who goes to Chuck E. Cheese to eat salad? Pizza is the entree of choice for hyped-up kids running from game to game as well as long-suffering adults moodily nibbling on the crusts while wishing themselves anywhere else on Earth. Still, if you ask anyone over the age of 9 what they think of Chuck E. Cheese pizza, the answer you get will likely be something along the lines of: they try not to think of it at all.

The intrepid staffers of MEL Magazine set out to test the hypothesis that Chuck E. Cheese pizza is the absolute worst of the worst, ordering pizza for delivery so they could sample it free of the distractions provided by what we'll politely term CEC's carnival atmosphere. Of the seven staffers involved in taste-testing, five found it to be more or less mediocre, with faint endorsements like: "This pizza stands solidly on the bottom rung of franchise brands that don't have Skee-Ball on the premises," "Surprisingly inoffensive," and "Chuck E. Cheese pizza isn't even close to the worst pizza I've ever had."

One taster invoked the old trope comparing bad pizza to bad sex in that even when it's bad, it's good, but calling Chuck E.'s version "a serviceable facsimile, but worth running away from the moment it gets up and goes to the bathroom." Two reviewers waxed nostalgic, one calling the pizza the taste of his lost youth, and the other enthusing over the "glorious" goodie bag he received as a freebie despite the pizza tasting of "cardboard and chemical cheese." A senior editor, however, said that as a Brit he knew bad pizza, but found Chuck E.'s to hit new lows and summed up his review by saying, "F*** the world for allowing this to exist"

If you haven't had Chuck E. Cheese pizza since childhood, you might be surprised to find that it tastes a little different now. This isn't just a trick of memory, though — they actually have tweaked the recipe a few times. In 2011 they made two significant tweaks, abandoning frozen dough and pre-shredded cheese for crusts baked and cheese shredded fresh on site. Serious Eats went to check out the new "cheesier and crispier" pizza, and their reviewer found he "quite enjoyed the pie." He compared it to Pizza Hut's pizza — not favorably nor unfavorably, just remarking on the similarities.

In 2015 the pizza underwent additional changes under a new executive chef, with CEC Entertainment CEO Tom Leverton admitting the chain's intent was to be "winning mom over with freshly-made dough, hand-grated mozzarella, and sauce made with vine-ripened tomatoes." Pizza Marketplace revealed that they'd been somewhat successful in this endeavor, with a nationwide blind taste test finding 57 percent of participants preferring Chuck E. Cheese pizza to Pizza Hut's.

One disturbing thing many people have noticed about Chuck E. Cheese pizza is how often the slices don't seem to match up. If you take one round pizza and slice it into 12 different pieces, it stands to reason that reassembling those pieces would create a basically round, pizza-shaped circle. How come so many Chuck E. Cheese pizzas seem, then, to be put together out of random slices that don't quite match up? How, if you're just cutting up one pizza, could it be possible to have it come out with mismatched slices? YouTuber Shane Dawson looked into this sinister mystery in an episode of his Investigating Conspiracies series, and the unsettling conclusion he reached is that it is quite possible that Chuck E. Cheese is actually collecting slices of uneaten pizza and reassembling them to make new/not new Frankenpizzas.

So Yummy decided to do their own investigation, and the pizza they received did nothing to refute their suspicions, as right out of the box their medium Chuck E. Cheese pizza had markedly uneven slices. Editor in chief Gina Vaynshteyn called the situation "bizarre and confusing," saying, "The crusts don't quite match, and why are only SOME slices glued together with cheese?" Editorial assistant Bailey Cox had such doubts that she couldn't even finish her pizza, explaining she felt she "needed to really inspect each slice before choosing... since I saw that some slices looked like they didn't belong with the whole pizza."

Chuck E. Cheese has been back in the news recently, once word got out that they'd tried to boost delivery sales by operating under an alias on GrubHub: Pasqually's Pizza and Wings. While they're not the only restaurant to try to boost sales by the use of a pseudonym — Applebee's has evidently got a side hustle going on with Neighborhood Wings — they nevertheless took quite the PR hit once word got out.

On the original Reddit post that outed Chuck E.'s sketchy ways, commenters weighed in with reactions like: "This seems Shady and I feel like it boarders [sic] on false advertising," and "D***! I would be a little p*ssed about that one. Ain't nobody want a Pie from that place." Thinknum Media took a look at Pasqually's approval ratings on GrubHub and found that they'd taken a drastic dip once customers found out that "Pasqually" was actually Pasqually P. Pieplate, the animatronic chef who performs in Chuck E.'s band (and once tried to kill him, not that we blame him after a few dozen repetitions of "we say happy, you say birthday").