Thursday, August 12, 2021

Randolph Beer, home of the flower-pepperoni pizza

I saw this in a YouTube video, and the place that serves this monster is where I'm going to celebrate the end of the Newcastle Diet next week:

flower-pepperoni pizza, Randolph Beer (Daechi branch)
Address: 서울 강남구 선릉로 64길 18 지하 1층

Randolph Beer is the name of the place; there are Randolph branches scattered throughout Seoul, with nearby branches in Daechi and Jamshil. I haven't seen a pizza that loaded with pepperoni since my college days, when I used to go to Geppetto's in Georgetown, DC. (I tend to think "Geppetto's" is the most stereotypical pizzeria name ever. Lots of American towns have a Geppetto's somewhere, and they're not all the same chain. It's just the go-to name, I guess, if you want your place to sound Italian.) Geppetto's made excellent, decadent, deep-dish pizza with thick-sliced pepperoni that would curl into little bowls—the sort of thing that my mother would have viewed with horror because each little bowl would be filled with meat fat (too bad she didn't live long enough to find out that natural fats are good for you, according to the keto way of thinking, although processed pepperoni as a whole is probably not).

I've just invited my buddy JW to help me celebrate the end of my diet and, I suppose, the beginning of my new diet. It promises to be a blood-sugar-destroying day: lunch at the office will be catered by my coworker's wife. Originally, the menu was supposed to be samgyetang, but I understand that things are now up in the air. I'll be bringing along some food for the troops as well because I'm guaranteed to be in a celebratory mood (and yes, I'll be paying for it on Saturday the 21st, the first day of keto). I've got some food I need to get rid of, like a bag of frozen mandu and some leftover hash browns, plus I want to make that decadent chocolate cake that I've made twice before. I'm going to see if I can rope my buddy Tom in for dinner as well, but he follows the beat of his own drum, so getting together with him is usually difficult even in the best of times.

So now you know my evil plot. Will eating like this set me back a few days? You bet. And I don't care. Ten fucking weeks on this diet, and I'm about to go nuts. I think a little celebrating is in order, and as I wrote before, it's just the one cheat day until my doctor's appointment on September 16. So the blood-sugar spike will be just that—a one-day spike that might take a few days to clear up, but by the time my appointment rolls around, the effects of the cheat day will be way behind me. That's the hope, anyway. Besides, if keto is to be my new lifestyle, then I have the rest of my life to reach my goal weight. I'm not trying to be blithe; I'm just balancing the urgency of losing weight with the reality that I'm not on a fixed schedule.

And believe me, when I hit Randolph, there will be photos.



2 comments:

John Mac said...

That pizza looks amazing! I've never seen one loaded up like that.

I think you are taking the right attitude towards your long-term dietary goals. It's about the lifestyle, not just a weight loss achievement. Maybe "cheat day" is the wrong way to look at it. We all need a vacation day from the daily grind of our routines. It is good to have something to look forward to. Enjoy your guilt-free indulgence!

Kevin Kim said...

I've heard some people say they dislike the term "cheat day" and prefer to call it "treat day" because it's a planned thing that they're very open about, and it's actually part of the larger campaign to lose weight by being the "sanity component," if you will. Personally, I'm fine with "cheat day," but I get where these people are coming from.