Speak Cheezy by Urban Pie Pizza was the most interesting pizza experience I’ve ever had

March 27, 2021, 6:13 PM PDT by Parkzer • Food, Tempo

This post is over 5 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.

I’m usually fairly indifferent about food—I’m someone who just eats to survive—but there is one particular aspect about food that I believe in strongly. This aspect is when someone asks you, “if you could eat only one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?” Yes, I understand that this question is generally asked to gauge what your favorite food is. However, if you take the question literally, I think the closest you can get to an objectively correct answer is “pizza.”

Pizza is so dynamic and flexible in variety and potential ingredients that it can usually be made and personalized to fit anyone’s preference. It also is one of the very few foods where you could theoretically put anything on it, and it will provide you with all the nutritional value you need to survive. Now, if you put it that way, then yes, I guess “pizza” is a cheat answer, because by saying “pizza” you are functionally including infinite potential toppings, and thus, you’re not actually really picking only one food.

Anyway, when I get pizza, I usually go to a build-your-own pizza place and add on some basic meats and basic vegetables as to not make the pizza taste too crazy. Sometimes I experiment with adding one or two extra toppings, but apart from that, I usually keep my pizza straightforward.

That changed for the first time yesterday when we had a company event and got catering from Urban Pie Pizza.

Urban Pie, which you can find on Instagram at @UrbanPieLA, has a mobile pizza truck named Speak Cheezy, which you can find on Instagram at @Speak_Cheezy. Long story short, they literally built a pizza oven inside a Chevrolet Express van and cook pizza on site when you call them out for a catering session.

While the oven was heating up and they were preparing the ingredients, we had a Caesar salad to start, with romaine, baby kale, parmesan, anchovy breadcrumbs, black pepper, and lemon. It was a little bitter for my personal taste, but the general consensus among our staff was that it was one of the wildest and best salads they’ve ever had.

The first pizza was the most basic and straightforward, which they call the Margherita, with tomato, parmesan, fresh mozzarella, basil, olive oil, and sea salt. This closest resembled the kind of pizza that I usually have. (One of our employees was very hungry and managed to grab a slice before I could take a photo.)

Next up was the Black Garlic with fresh mozzarella, parmesan, smoked ricotta, basil, black garlic-infused olive oil, and black pepper.

Our third pizza was the Brooklyn Bee with tomato, shredded mozzarella, Calabrese salami, basil, Grana, and Calabrian chili honey. This was the most interesting-tasting pizza, and the most flavorful in a non-traditional way. They left some of the toppings on the side so we could use our own discretion when it came to deciding how deep we wanted to go with the extra flavors.

Next was the Potato Pie with Yukon gold potatoes, shredded mozzarella, parmesan, Fontina, red onion, and rosemary.

The second-to-last pizza was another topping-packed and flavorful one, called the Bon Chovy, with tomato, tomato jam, black olive spread, capers, garlic, Sicilian oregano, anchovy, Grana, and burrata cheese.

And finally, my favorite one was last, the Carbonara with guanciale, shredded mozzarella, smoked ricotta, scallion, pecorino, garlic, and egg yolk.

I thought this was an amazing experience. The three chefs had great personalities and added to the fun and excitement of the environment with their own positive attitudes. I wouldn’t say that all the pizzas were perfectly to my liking, but I’m very glad that I tried one slice of each type, and I did find a few of them exceptionally delicious. That, mixed with the novelty of them bringing a pizza oven on-site in a van, and I’d say this was one of our best company events we’ve had.

If you’re also interested in ordering Speak Cheezy by Urban Pie Pizza for catering for your own event, I imagine you want to know how much it would cost; here’s how much we paid for a party of 12:

Pizza ×14	$ 276.00
Salad ×12	$ 81.00
Labor	$ 74.00
Gratuity (22%)	$ 94.82
Sales tax (10.25%)	$ 53.90
Total	$ 579.72

(Disclaimer: These are the prices that we paid, and might not necessarily reflect the prices quoted to you on a future date. Keep in mind that they reserve the right to adjust their pricing based on changing costs of ingredients, levels of demand, and any other reason at their discretion.)

For the purposes of simplifying the calculation, I consider 3 salads to be equivalent to 1 pizza. This means that we received a total of 18 “dishes” or “items.” Divide the total cost by 18 and we ended up paying $32.21 each.

That does sound like a lot for a single pizza, considering they were fairly thin and resembled the size of a personal pizza around 8-10 inches in diameter. However, this is Southern California with inflated prices, and I’ve seen gourmet pizzas at restaurants go for $25-30 each without even including taxes or dine-in gratuity. So, with that in mind, the price of Speak Cheezy by Urban Pie honestly wasn’t really that bad. We also got an experience unique from any regular restaurant, where we got to see a mobile pizza oven inside a van and enjoyed a company dinner on the patio of our own oceanside office.

So, the final verdict. Would I recommend this? … It depends:

If you’re an in-house corporate event organizer looking for a fun team activity for your employees and you have some street space in front of your office for the van, then absolutely yes. You’re saving money by using your own office that you’re paying a lease on anyway, so you don’t have to go pay extra to rent out a party space. Even if people are familiar with food trucks, I imagine not many have seen a literal pizza oven in one, so it’s a good way to do something new and exciting with your employees, as opposed to just going to a traditional dine-in restaurant.
If you’re having a special celebration and you have the money to spare, then probably yes. Similarly to the corporate event scenario, your friends and family likely haven’t seen a mobile pizza oven, and if you haven’t noticed yet, the recurring theme here is that this is about the unique and special experience as much as it is about the food.
If you’re on a tight budget, then no. I don’t know what the minimum order is because we had enough employees to pass it, but if they’re going to come out on-site to cook pizza for you, I imagine there definitely is a minimum order. If you’re not in a place where you’re willing to pay premium prices for food, especially considering the fact that we’re in the tail end of a global pandemic, then this is something to keep on your list for later. There’s nothing wrong with getting build-your-own large pizzas for $15 at a chain pizza store for now.

Side note: You may have noticed that the chefs are not wearing face coverings in the photographs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is because we invited them to enjoy drinks with our staff while they were cooking, all three chefs were fully vaccinated, and the event took place exclusively outdoors in our patio area. If you plan on ordering Speak Cheezy while the pandemic is still ongoing, rest assured that they arrived with face coverings, and only removed them after our consent and invitation to do so.

I went on a boat

March 23, 2021, 9:43 PM PDT by Parkzer • Tempo

And it felt like my skull was about to cave in.

I’m not someone who is very compatible with water. I never go swimming, I intentionally moved to the middle of the Mojave Desert, and I even hate when there’s water vapor in the air (i.e., humidity). It’s probably no surprise then that, when I want to engage in some leisurely activities, I never go looking near water.

That changed today. Tempo’s main headquarters is on Naples Island in Long Beach (our address is public now because we consolidated into a single facility and it’s the official registered address of our corporation). We have our own dock that opens up into the Alamitos Bay and connects directly to the Pacific Ocean. Naturally, one of the staff activities we decided to do was to go on a boat ride.

I’ve only had one prior boat-related experience in my life, and it was when I was working with the Cary Police Department in Illinois to do a search of the Fox River to try and find the body of Wendy M. Kimura, a missing woman. Although I cannot provide further details due to confidentiality reasons, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about the search back in 2013. Here is a photograph I took on June 12, 2013 at 10:21 AM when we were preparing the search area; you can see the sonar boat doing a test run.

Back to the present day. We rented a boat, docked it next to our headquarters, loaded it up with food and supplies, climbed in, and set off into the water with our CEO reynad driving.

Usually when I get motion sickness, it hits me hard and I immediately get sick. I feel like I’m about to vomit, I start getting headaches, and I start yawning uncontrollably. But, for some reason, I experienced the onset of seasickness differently. Instead of hitting me all at once, I gradually got more and more sick.

This actually caused me to believe that I wasn’t actually that sick at all. Usually, my level of sickness reaches it peak within minutes, then it plateaus. Apparently, when I get seasick, that’s no longer the case—things just continuously get worse and worse until I feel like my skull is about to collapse.

When I felt like I couldn’t handle it anymore, I asked reynad to stop by the team house again to drop me off after we had completed a lap around Naples Island. I got out, immediately laid in bed, and began my very slow process of recovery.

After the guys wrapped up the boat trip, I later found out that we had gotten banned from renting a boat from that facility again.

Apparently, we were not permitted to dock the boat (I imagine due to liability reasons). The boat we rented had a maximum capacity of 8, but if you dock the boat, additional people can enter the boat without the boat rental facility’s knowledge. Boats are fairly strict about capacity limits; anything greater than 12 actually counts as a passenger ship and requires far stricter safety regulations than just an 8- or 12-person boat.

Well, guess what. We docked the boat.

How did the rental facility find out? We sent three employees to pick up the boat, and when they dropped it off, I guess they only went with two. One person was clearly missing. Our employee who returned the boat had to explain the situation. Instead of saying something along the lines of “we had an emergency and had to drop off the third person” (to be clear, that obviously wasn’t the case, but it’s definitely a believable story), he instead thought the best course of action was to say that the third person reached for a jellyfish in the water and fell overboard.

We got banned for docking the boat and lying to staff.

…

Anyway, here’s a picture of our Director of Post-Production filming our Influencer and Marketing Manager making an announcement video for one of his upcoming events.

Good thing they were far enough away from the water that there was no risk of falling in.

How not to commit insurance fraud

March 18, 2021, 7:33 PM PDT by Parkzer • 2018 GMC Canyon, Video

Before it was commonplace to film everything ever, it used to be difficult to prove things. This was particularly troublesome for insurance companies when they receive a claim from one involved party saying that something happened, but then they hear from the other involved party saying that what happened was actually completely different. It ended up being one person’s word against the other, and with very little concrete evidence, it was difficult to prove things one way or the other.

Now that everyone is eager to whip out their phones and start recording everything around them—even if it entails failing to act, and filming an emergency in lieu of helping a person or situation in need—it becomes much easier to see what actually happened.

As dash cams become much more popular, people attempting to commit automobile insurance fraud are discouraged because it’s very difficult to get away with something if there is video evidence clearly illustrating that the alleged perpetrator was actually the victim. Dash cam footage can literally be the difference between getting charged with manslaughter if someone intentionally jumps in front of your vehicle, and proving your innocence and avoiding prison time. So, of course, I have a dash cam.

Luckily, my situation wasn’t quite as severe as the manslaughter example above. I also don’t know if this was actually attempted insurance fraud, or if it was just a malfunctioning vehicle. Either way, I’m glad I have the dash cam footage in case I later get wrongly accused of a hit-and-run, and because it makes for an entertaining blog post.

12:57:57	Heading westbound on Sahara Avenue, I merge into the left-most left turn lane and approach a white sedan already at the light before me.
12:58:14	I come to a complete stop. The brake lights of the white sedan in front of me turn off and the vehicle slowly begins creeping backwards.
12:58:27	The white sedan makes impact with the front of my vehicle. For a few seconds, I continue feeling the white sedan pushing back against me, my truck supporting the weight of the sedan. The driver of the white sedan begins making hand gestures and looks visibly distressed, but does not exit her vehicle. I suspect that she is attempting to commit insurance fraud, so I point towards my dash cam. She stops motioning and pulls forward. I drive a bit closer to read her license plate, but due to the dark tinted cover mounted on top of her plate, I’m unable to read the characters.
12:59:43	The light turns green and the white sedan begins driving. I follow the vehicle for nearly two minutes, but it does not pull over.
13:01:26	The vehicle changes lanes into a two-lane left turn, so I merge into the lane next to it and pull up beside her.
13:01:36	I roll down my passenger-side window to converse with the driver. The driver rolls down her window and begins yelling, asking why I had rear-ended her and whether I had a problem with her. I, having nothing to be mad about, calmly inform her that she is the one who backed into me, then pointed to my dash cam again, reminding her that I have video footage. I ask her if she is having a medical emergency that caused her to lose control of her vehicle, and whether or not I needed to call EMS, to which she did not respond. She states that it is impossible she backed into me because she puts her vehicle in Park at stop lights. I inquired whether she intends to pull over, to which she did not respond. She asks if there is any damage to the rear of her vehicle, to which I respond that I am unsure, as it is difficult to see from far away. I offer to pull over into a nearby parking lot with her to assess her vehicle for any damage and file a police report if needed. She replies “no, thank you” and rolls up her window.
13:02:17	She pulls her vehicle up so we can no longer make eye contact.

So to get the obvious question out of the way: Why didn’t I force her to pull over, continue following her, put more effort into getting her license plate, etc.?

Well, I drive a pickup truck with a grille guard mounted to the frame that protects the front end of my vehicle. These things can easily clock in at over a hundred pounds of steel, and are designed to protect the vehicle against threats like unexpected wild animals, plow through thick branches while driving through dense forests, and deflect rocks kicked up by vehicles in front of you in off-roading situations.

Needless to say, a small sedan backing into me wouldn’t even leave a scratch.

So, what do I think happened? Of course, this could have been an attempted insurance scam, where she backs into me and claims that I rear-ended her, then if I didn’t have dash cam footage of the incident, I would be blamed because it’s more likely that I drove into her when she was stopped still at the red light than it is for her to put her car into reverse and back into me.

But, remember how she said that it’s “impossible” that she backed into me because she puts her vehicle in Park at stop lights?

I think a more likely explanation of what happened here is that, after stopping at the red light, she intended to shift her automatic transmission to Park, but didn’t shift it all the way, and stopped it at Reverse instead. Thinking she was in Park, she let go of the brake pedal, causing her vehicle to roll backwards. After thinking she was in Park, she might have distracted herself (e.g., by looking down at her phone) and not even noticed she was rolling backwards.

Moral of the story? Get a dash cam.

Cat #3 is here

March 17, 2021, 8:12 PM PDT by Parkzer • Cats

And by cat #3, I actually mean cat #1. Mochi is a Scottish Fold and is actually my roommate’s first cat, which she got during the summer of 2019.

Mochi was pregnant with a litter of kittens while my roommate was in the process of moving from New York City to Las Vegas, so she left Mochi behind with one of her friends so she wouldn’t be flying across the country with a pregnant cat. That ended up being a wise decision, as Mochi gave birth during the time when we were still in my studio condo before our two-bedroom unit was available. That wouldn’t necessarily have been bad, but it would’ve definitely been inconvenient.

Mochi has been getting settled in for a few weeks now, and she’s doing well. She’s actually getting accustomed to her new environment fairly quickly (as opposed to the other two cats, which were much more shy and reserved before beginning to explore the entire new condo). In fact, she was actually being the aggressive one for a bit, and was bullying Pudding and Pumpkin when she first arrived.

Now that Mochi is here, my roommate got a third litter box. Before we had an opportunity to get it set up, Pumpkin decided that it would be a fantastic bed. … Everything is a viable bed for Pumpkin.

Hi Pudding.

My roommate’s fans’ favorite thing about Pumpkin is usually his appearance. People tend to like the folded ears, but another thing about Pumpkin is that his pupils get extra large when it is dark at night. Here is Pumpkin lurking within my pillows, ready to pounce. (Lighting has been artificially enhanced in the photograph so you can actually see him.)

Because we live in a high-rise condo with floor-to-ceiling windows, it can get overwhelmingly bright inside during the day. To further increase the magnitude, my roommate’s old apartment was a literal hybrid ground floor and basement unit that got very little to no sunlight. I imagine that Mochi had to take some time to get used to all the sun. For a while, one of her favorite spots was a cloth cubby with its backside turned towards the windows.

I usually keep my closet door closed, but I obviously open it a few times a day to actually get clothes in and out when I’m changing. The closet door has a distinct metallic clink sound when the door opens and closes because it has one of those rolling securing systems that doesn’t have a lock but uses friction and physics to keep the door from randomly swinging ajar.

I guess the cats really love the inside of my closet, because when they hear it open, they’ll often run over and run inside.

And finally, here is Pumpkin and his tongue.

My non-registered, non-certified investment advice for you

March 11, 2021, 12:41 PM PST by Parkzer • Finance, Highlights

As is hopefully clear by the title, I want to point out that I am not a registered investment advisor and do not have the qualifications to become one. This anecdote outlines my personal experiences only, and is not to be used as guidance to manage your assets in lieu of a certified professional.

With that being said, my advice to you is actually very similar to the disclaimer above, and it is: Do not trick yourself into making unjustifiable investment decisions based on others’ experiences if you are not fully informed of the entire situation.

The reason I’m writing this blog post is because I’ve been chatting quite a bit lately with my friends about investments. Most have listened to my experiences and intelligently used them as learning opportunities to do their own research about the related topics, but a few others… have made some questionable decisions.

It’s fun to talk about the wild and unexpected nature of the stock market, and it can be thrilling to share stories of huge successes or massive failures. What isn’t fun is talking about the steady growth of reliable index funds. Thus, if you were to ever ask me about my investments, I will probably talk about meme stocks, because talking about meme stocks makes for an inherently more interesting conversation.

A very important thing to remember is that the ratio of topics in a conversation does not necessarily correlate with the ratio of my actual investment distribution. That means, if I spend 95% of my time talking with you about meme stocks and the remaining 5% about index funds, that does not mean I own 95% meme stocks and 5% index funds.

If you misinterpret that and assume I have 95% meme stocks, then proceed to align your own portfolio to have 95% meme stocks, then you have probably made an incredibly stupid decision. That isn’t to say that you won’t see success—if you’re lucky, you could become a millionaire overnight, and I never said that there can’t be stupid millionaires—but you have just as likely of a chance of losing almost everything.

I always keep that last point in mind—that you have a chance of losing almost everything. That’s why the amount I invest in meme stocks and other extremely high-risk securities is limited only to the amount that I am comfortable losing. I am not comfortable losing my entire portfolio, so I choose to put a vast majority of it in things that I know will not suddenly vanish overnight.

I have a simple way to visualize this. Here is a table of the diversity of my portfolio.

Cash This includes money in my online savings account and a tiny amount in my checking account, as well as money market settlement funds for money that has been transferred to my brokerage in preparation for investment that I haven’t had an opportunity to use yet.	17.70%
Index funds – Domestic This includes a variety of United States index funds ranging anywhere from the general S&P 500, to funds specifically targeting objectives like growth and dividends, covering across a variety of small- to large-capitalization companies.	37.19%
Index funds – International This provides me with exposure to the international stock market, including both developed and emerging international economies.	6.96%
Target retirement funds I use Vanguard to manage my tax-advantaged retirement accounts. Within my Roth IRA and SEP-IRA, I keep my money in the target retirement funds VFFVX and VTTSX, which are funds managed by Vanguard with dynamic composition so it prioritizes rapid growth during youth and stability closer to retirement. These target retirement funds have a mixture of domestic and international index funds, as well as some bonds later as retirement years approach, which is why I itemized this out separately.	27.59%
Bonds When I was a much younger investor, I was far less tolerant of risk for two main reasons: (1) I overestimated the risk and volatility of index funds, which was caused by my inexperience with investing, and (2) I had low net worth so I had more of an incentive to protect what I had. I bought some bonds back then, but haven’t added to my bond balance since; I figured I might as well keep the bonds I already purchased, seeing as it’s a very small portion of my portfolio.	2.35%
Real estate investment trusts (REITs) REITs are a way for you to diversify your portfolio to gain exposure to real estate without having to go out and purchase a property. I am definitely interested in purchasing actual real estate sometime in the future, but until then, I decided to invest a small amount into REITs.	2.59%
Cryptocurrency I’ve researched and experimented with cryptocurrency for a while, but for now, I’ve settled on owning some Bitcoin and Ethereum.	4.20%
Speculative stocks These are individual stocks that I purchase directly through a brokerage, rather than stocks that are included in index funds or ETFs. As of right now, a majority of my speculative selections have been in travel companies, but these are stocks that I actively trade depending on where I think the market is headed. I do this primarily for fun, with capital growth only being a secondary objective.	1.03%
Meme stocks Just so I can say I was a part of the retail investor movement, I own shares in GameStop (GME), AMC Entertainment (AMC), Blackberry (BB), and other strange securities as recommended by the Reddit community Wall Street Bets.	0.37%

If you loosely categorize my investments, you can say that I have 94.39% in “safe” holdings and 5.61% in “dangerous” holdings.

Let’s assume that disaster strikes. Bitcoin crashes and falls from $58,000 to just $4,000 like it was throughout a lot of early 2019, losing 93%+ of its value. Ethereum faces a similarly proportional crash. COVID-19 mutates into COVID-9001 and locks down the entire planet again, causing travel companies’ stocks to plummet to only 20% of their current value. And of course, GameStop, AMC, and Blackberry all go entirely bankrupt. In this theoretical scenario, I lose 5.11% of my portfolio.

Not ideal, but I’m ok with that.

An even greater mitigating factor is that this loss is based on the current value of my portfolio. If you’re familiar with cryptocurrency, you know how fast it’s risen in value. If you calculate my losses relative to cost basis rather than current value, then the percentage of money I would lose is even less.

So if you’re ever interested in buying Bitcoin or shares of GameStop because of me or someone else talking excitedly about the topic, and you want to “copy” us because we seem to sound like knowledgeable investors, keep the table above in mind. Don’t let our excitement falsely trick you into thinking that we’ve gone all-in on meme stocks.

To be clear, this is not me telling you whether you should or should not go all-in on meme stocks; this is me making sure you know that I absolutely did not.

Hello again, Long Beach

March 9, 2021, 11:32 AM PST by Parkzer • Tempo, Travel

It’s been just over a month since my last visit to SoCal, so I made an extended weekend trip over to Long Beach again to visit the Tempo staff. The beginning of every month is usually straining from a work perspective because of end-of-month finance tasks I have to wrap up from the previous month, so making a visit to SoCal is a nice change in scenery for a bit while I recover from the Tetris effect, except with rows, columns, and cells instead of Tetris pieces.

Our group activity of the trip was a team lunch at The Crab Pot Restaurant & Bar.

Because of the pandemic, we were only able to dine in with outdoor seating, and our party of 7 had to split into two separate groups.

The cold in Long Beach is a special kind of cold. I grew up in the Chicagoland suburbs where it just randomly blizzards throughout the winter, but I guess I never got used to the cold. It does also get cold in Las Vegas—it can drop below freezing temperatures overnight during the winter. But, the cold in Long Beach, even though it’s technically numerically 10+ degrees warmer than Las Vegas right now, feels much colder because of the ocean wind.

While we were waiting for some tables to open up, we were seated at a “bar area.” The bar was still a table, but I imagine it’s some technicality that allows them to remain operational during the pandemic if they split up their tables by classification. The “bar” table wasn’t that cold; we got a few appetizers, including some oysters.

After our actual meal table was ready, we were relocated closer to the oceanfront, where I proceeded to begin freezing to death. The restaurant had some heat lamps, so I asked for the one near our table to be turned on, and I sat myself down directly under it. I know for a fact that it helped a lot, because the person sitting to my left had a little container of liquified butter, and her butter literally started forming ice on the top because of how cold it was.

After our meal, our friend saw a different party getting some dessert, and she wanted some as well, so she ordered a mud pie for us. We found out that mud pie wasn’t cake, but rather, a massive glob of excessively sweet ice cream covered in chocolate syrup and whipped cream. We got through a decent chunk of it together, but we eventually couldn’t handle the sweetness and passed it on to the other table that had the other half of our party.

This was a fairly quick trip just to visit staff; I’ll be headed back to Long Beach again not too long from now for a more long-term stay. Before my flight back home, I stopped by a French bakery to get some macarons for my roommate. It had a nice, warm aura to it, so I snapped a photo.