During Dewick's slower hours, an employee stationed at the pizza oven spies a few hungry students wandering solemnly about the empty heated trays. She watches their crestfallen expressions as they recognize, drifting towards the sandwich bar, their doomed meal prospects.
Eager to assuage their hunger and vexation, she makes sure to have a few extra pizzas garnished and steaming atop the counter — even though the "slow hours" constitute part of her break time.
If you've ever come to the counter and not found your desired pizza, you've most likely met a luminous smile, and, behind it, a woman more than willing to craft you one decorated with any panoply of ingredients.
"I can do creative — as long as it's okay with my staff manager," she told me in our chat during one Thursday's slow hours. "We try to make everyone happy," she added.
Her name? I can't say. I've been asked, in regard for the many wonderful and deserving employees of Dewick, to withhold it. Argh, I know! It's rough. It does rhyme with "skinny" though. But that's it; I shouldn't have even told you that. Okay, she may or may not share her name with the enchanting love interest of Kevin Arnold in "Wonder Years." Now I'm in trouble...
Born in Hong Kong, she (we'll call her "Margarita," like the pizza), was the eldest of four. She immigrated to America roughly two decades ago, working at the salad bar in a junior college cafeteria before finding employment at a small family business in Boston. As the business hit some turbulent financial times, Margarita explored other job prospects and was eventually referred to Tufts by a friend. Upon receiving her position at Dewick, she moved to Medford, where she has lived for five years.
Her avocations include reading history and cookbooks as well as watching the occasional TV movie. Asked if she often made it out to the movies, she said, "I've seen two movies in the theater in the two decades I've been here: ‘Jurassic Park' [1993] and ‘The Fugitive' [1993]." I told her that she's missing only one particular romantic comedy that, once viewed, would form, along with "Jurassic" and "The Fugitive," the perfect movie trifecta of the past twenty years. Being a man of interminable class and wit, I suggested the movie that put Julia Roberts on the map: "Mystic Pizza" (1988).
How strange that I'd suggest that movie, since Margarita's pizza does seem to contain something almost, yes, — mystic. You can imagine my shock when she told me that she hasn't been perfecting the recipe all her life — that the list of secret ingredients hadn't been passed down from her great-great-great-grandfather, gotten stolen, skipped a generation, gotten lost in a fire, been recovered, amended, and — miraculously — found its way, through oral tradition, to her dough-kneading fingertips.
"When I started, I didn't know anything about pizza," she said with a laugh.
In the ways of a true pizza chef, she makes an effort to listen to students' and co-workers' opinions. Their suggestions helped form her Holy Grail of pizza-making — a comprehensive ongoing project enumerating the dos and don'ts of making a decent pie.
For instance, she told me, "If you want to make a BLT pizza, put the bacon and tomato on first and put the lettuce on after the pizza cooks." She's meticulous, scrupulous. And I've watched enough "Iron Chef" to know that it's attention to such subtle detail that differentiates the great chefs from the mediocre.
Ending our chat together, I thanked her for taking time to meet with me and, in her way of deflecting appreciation, she said, "Thank you," gesturing, with a pass of her hand, towards all the students in the cafeteria, "If nobody eats pizza, I don't have a job." I assured her that she should have no worries — being a pizza chef on a college campus is probably the most secure job anyone could have.
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Michael Goetzman is a sophomore who has not yet declared a major. He can be reached at Michael.Goetzman@tufts.edu.
