Once Little Caesars abandoned their “Pizza Pizza” slogan, they seemed to fall off the face of the earth. A few years later, though, they were reborn with the $5 Hot-N-Ready large pizza. The idea behind this is that pizza has become too complicated. Choosing a topping can be a pain in the ass, then finding the right coupon to go along with your purchase can be even more difficult. With the Hot-N-Ready pizza, you can walk right into as Little Caesars at any time, throw down five bucks and walk out with either a large cheese or large pepperoni. It’s a genius idea, because who really wants a different topping on their pizza? But it only works if the product still tastes good. I recently paid a visit back to Little Caesars to see if their Hot-N-Ready was just like I remembered.

The only Little Caesars I really know of in LA is in the stretch of Centinela that falls between Mar Vista and Marina Del Rey, but really doesn’t have a name for itself. I walked into the place and asked for a large pepperoni, which they gladly pulled out of a heating device and handed to me. I hoped that the pizza hadn’t been there for long and a forked over my five bucks and change for sales tax purposes.

I took the box home and opened it up to begin eating. It looked like any normal delivery pizza would. Pepperoni covered it in just enough places and it didn’t looked like it had been hanging out in the heating box for too long. I took a bite and was quite content with what I tasted. There were no special ingredients and really nothing special about the pizza at all, except for how easy and cheap it was to get. There are plenty of better pizzas in the world, but a reliable $5 pizza is difficult to find outside of Little Caesars.

When eating at a taco truck, I am typically drunk and there are few demands that have to be met. One of those demands is that my food have no vegetables, the other is that the food is edible. When I recently ventured out to the Taco Truck at Venice and Centinela, I was in for a rude surprise.

I stumbled up to the window to place my order. When I inquired about the ingredients in the chicken quesadilla, I was told that there were no vegetables. Then, I asked about the carne asada taco, which I was told came with onions. I asked the lady for no onions, and to make it offensively clear, I also said, “no cebollas” (cebolla being the spanish word for onion).

When my food was ready, I headed home, opened up my polystyrene container and was greeted with a most shocking surprise. For some reason, the inhabitants of the taco truck had chosen to empty out some poor salad into my styrofoam. It was an unwise choice, as it surely could not be eaten. Unfortunately, it was not the unwisest of choices made by said inhabitants. As I unwrapped the foil that engulfed my taco, I discovered a multitude of onions. In anger, I only ate the quesadilla and left the taco on the floor of my cold room, thinking I would be more kind and patient when I awoke.

Some twelve hours later, I awoke from my slumber to find that those onions on my taco had not been some unfortunate nightmare, they were all too real. I set to work at removing the onions and then brought the taco to my toaster oven for some reheating. Once the onions were removed, the taco didn’t taste so bad, however, no more than an hour later, my stomach began to rumble into an intense pain. Was it because I had eaten a taco that had lain on my floor overnight? Impossible, I have eaten pizzas that have sat on the floor for many nights. My stomach is far too strong for that. It must have been the onions. They must have planted the seeds of my stomachache.

Onions are truly evil, and so is that taco truck for forcing their presence upon me.