Just like red wines, artisan cheeses, and “friendships” according to this throw pillow my grandma used to have, pizza is simply one of those things that just gets better with age. 

So why not – it occurred to me the other day as I ate my avocado-on-saltine dinner over the kitchen counter in my pajamas at 5:30 p.m. – have a restaurant that exclusively serves the best form of pizza, aka leftover?

Sure hot and fresh is the “traditional” way of enjoying this type of cuisine. But when all of the ingredients meld together by force of time and refrigeration, something absolutely magical happens. And that magic – I reasoned, while using the saltines wrapper as a plate – should be readily available to consumers.

Now, granted, I haven’t eaten at a restaurant in over a year, and frankly most of my current meals look less like meals and more like something I call “Cheez-Its straight from the box.” Perhaps my memory is a bit skewed, and perhaps restaurants exclusively offer food that’s prepared on the spot, cooked, and served immediately.

But I’m still fairly confident that this leftover pizza idea could revolutionize the restaurant industry forever. It’s simple, it’s delicious, and it’s frankly the more superior version of pizza.

Other perks to cold, leftover pizza versus hot, fresh pizza:

• It won’t burn the shit out of the roof of your mouth
• You won’t have burned mouth roof skin flapping around for days
• Your tongue won’t be involuntarily drawn to that flappy skin like a moth to a flame
• You won’t feel this obligation to tell people about the mouth roof flappy skin distraction that’s been the only thing you can think about since it came into your life a week ago

I Looked It Up to See If “Leftover Pizza” Restaurants Already Exist

After coming up with what I refer to as “my greatest idea yet” (which, yes, includes another idea I came up with called “getting drunk at work”), I wanted to see if it was already a real thing.

When I searched “leftover pizza restaurant,” all I found were “7 Delicious Ideas You Can Make with Leftover Pizza” (an article I could have written myself: 1-7 “just fucking eat it”) and an opinion piece on Today.com about whether or not Chuck E. Cheese serves leftover pizza. 

Which frankly I hope is an opinion piece applauding their work on helping to eliminate food waste. But that opinion piece was written by someone else, and they didn’t ask me to include my own.

I then looked up “cold pizza restaurant,” and found a whole bunch of opinions on Reddit plus this restaurant chain called Papa Murphy’s that does sell cold pizzas, but by cold they mean pre-baked.

Which, come on, is something you can literally find in the freezer section of ANY grocery store and most 7-Elevens.

So yeah, it looks like no one has thought of this and I’m either impressed with my fantastic idea, disappointed I can’t get it anywhere, or starting to realize that no one else has such high-bar hopes for such low-bar foods.

Other Things This Leftover Pizza Restaurant May Serve

My leftover pizza concept certainly doesn’t have to be limited to leftover pizza, however. There are MANY other types of foods that are much better consumed in a different state than their original purpose. For example, cookie dough. Who the fuck thought to bake that in the first place?

Some other items you could find on my leftover pizza menu include (but are not limited to):

• Frozen Thin Mints
• Softened ice cream
• Cold fried chicken
• Overripe bananas
• Next-day chili
• Burnt marshmallows
• Slightly stale Pop-Tarts
• Chinese takeout from like four days ago

One Day… 

As a nine-to-five kind of person with priorities in all the wrong places, I don’t have a single entrepreneurial instinct – even with innovative ideas like a leftover pizza restaurant, and this one I wrote down in the middle of the night called “cheesecake but with an egg on it so you can eat it for breakfast.” But I do hope this inspires somebody with way more ambition than me to get this concept off the ground.

I especially hope that somebody gets ambition, say, across the street from my home.

Or in my own kitchen. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s dinnertime and I have some Triscuits and peanut butter calling my name.