I need to preface this story with a confession: we were both high. THAT BEING SAID, this was super weird.

Last night we were hungry, but I had forgotten to take anything out of the freezer and none of the other in-house options were exciting, so we decided to order in. We were also bored of our usual suspects, so we went through our delivery options to find anything that looked universally appealing.

Way, way down on the list of restaurants, we found a place we hadn’t tried before. It was highly rated (9.8/10), had reasonable prices, and offered free delivery. Great! From that moment on, though, everything was .. suspicious:

• The place had a very generic name, like “Good Food” – something hard to Google
• There was no address for the place listed, just a street name
• The menu was huge, which always makes me suspicious of a place
• The food they sold was unusual – not that the available items were weird, but that everything was described oddly:
  • “Breaded munchies”, with no description of what a “munchie” is
  • Each pizza listing started with “popular pizza sauce” as an ingredient
  • “Hand-sliced mushrooms”
  • “Spaghetti noodles mixed with ..”
  • “Popular veggie sandwich”
• You could add toppings to your pizza. In addition to toppings you’d normally find on pizza, you could add:
  • Sour cream
  • Ricotta
  • Spinach
  • Ginger
  • Garlic
  • Cilantro
  • Chili flakes

We decided we were just high enough to be adventurous, so we ordered some food. The weirdness did not stop there:

• The ordered arrived quickly, but there was absolutely zero identifying details on the packaging. The food came in a plain paper bag, a plain container, and completely blank pizza boxes. No logo, store name, menu, receipt – nothing but generic, blank containers and the food itself.
• Speaking of the food, it was eerily perfect: three identical pizza bases with evenly spaced, totally uniform toppings. Honestly, it looked like what you’d get if you worked on the Enterprise and asked your food replicator for a 10″ Margherita pizza, warm.
• We did, in fact, order the “breaded munchies” because we couldn’t imagine what they could possibly be. They were parmesan-garlic bread bites – not breaded, but actual bread.
• The food tasted fine! Nothing to write a big blog post about, but perfectly edible and quite good – we’ve absolutely had far, far worse food delivered. If it wasn’t for the fact that a) we were evidently Conspiracy Theory High and b) all the things listed above, it would have been a routine, run-of-the-mill dinner order from a place we hadn’t tried before.

My current theory is that we stumbled upon a mid-range catering outfit doing pandemic business as a pop-up pizza place. Fake restaurants were all over the news a few years ago when food delivery started outpacing dine-in service, but mostly in big cities like New York and San Francisco – definitely not on the outer edge of suburbia, a stone’s throw from another country.

It was fucking weird, and it just kept getting weirder.

DINNER WAS SUS, Y’ALL.