RIP Armand's Chicago Pizzeria, (?-2017)

Screenshot from Armand's website.

For as long as I can remember, I've been a big fan of food. An older cousin claims that, when I was a baby, she could get my attention by waving a piece of chocolate cake in the air from across the room, and would laugh as I scurried over to get it. In those same early years, my parents recall that I would often fall asleep in the meal I was eating. So yeah, I like food, is what I'm saying, but if you've been reading this blog, you knew that already.

At the same time, though, it seems that many of the places where I like to eat are not very popular. Why this is, I don't know. My tastes are not rare or impeccable; quite the opposite, in fact. You could say I'm a picky eater, so long as you mean I am committed to cheap, large quantities of plain food. And yet these are the places that seem to suffer. First, there was Quizno's, a Subway competitor restaurant chain that opened a location within walking distance of my Loveland home. Frequent visits there convinced me it was superior to Subway; few agreed, and it soon closed (presaging larger struggles for the parent brand itself in subsequent years).

Then, there was the poor 20-mile house, an historic building (formerly) located exactly 20 miles north of Cincinnati, where before cars travelers would rest before making the journey into town. The location cycled through dozens of owners, including one who seemed to make it work (and they offered bottomless rolls!). Impressed, my family actually returned for a second meal, only to find that management had changed yet again (I like to think I put the previous owners out of business by eating too many rolls). A few years ago, the building itself was destroyed to make way for...a gas station. And finally (for now), there's Bob Evans, a restaurant franchise born in Ohio that has been struggling to define itself over the past several years. One casualty of this struggle was what I considered their flagship, self-consciously rustic location just outside The Beach Waterpark in Mason, Ohio. It closed recently, ending many years of post-Church or post-Beach meals. (And I'm not going to count the self-consciously modest Decent Deli, a Blue Ash restaurant that closed before I had a chance to see if it was actually decent, as I long intended to do. I guess it wasn't?)

This trend even followed me to college. Oakley! (exclamation in original) was a nice little deli just off of my college's campus. I regularly treated myself to meals there, even though it was often short of basic ingredients (it was surprising how often I ordered something, only to be told "outta chicken" or "outta cheese" by the deli's owner). It closed before I graduated. And this example may be a bit of a stretch, but the dining company that managed my college's food provision also "closed" while I was there; it was replaced by another company that offered more exquisitely-prepared food, but in lesser quantities, and so I was not a fan of the change.

When Saga served Hillsdale's food, this page displayed the weekly menus. It went blank after Saga died.

Even in D.C., the places I like to eat have not been immune to market forces. I am a big fan of Cosi (which I incorrectly pronounce "co-sigh," thanks to this), a sort of Panera competitor I had never encountered before coming to D.C. for the first time, but which now I can barely imagine life without. You can watch them make all of their bread (they do it in an open-fire brick oven), and, best of all, they leave out all the bread they don't use to make their delicious sandwiches in bowls for anyone to grab and eat. When I learned that my company's new workplace would be right next to a Cosi location, I feared for my wallet...until I walked by it one day and discovered that it, too, had closed. Alas.

But the loss of a single Cosi franchise pales in comparison to the sheer injustice of the closure of Armand's Chicago Pizzeria's Capitol Hill location. Since my first internship in D.C. in the summer of 2012 (!), this Armand's has always been about a five-minute walk from where I have lived. I have no idea how many times I've been to the place, how many times I've sampled their decent, if unspectacular, Chicago-style pizza and Italian cuisine. I've been there alone, with D.C. friends, and with visiting family and friends. For sheer convenience and reliability, it was hard to beat Armand's.

And for sheer value, it was hard to beat Armand's Saturday pizza buffet. Every Saturday, from 11:30 am-2:30 pm (and every weekday, but I rarely went on weekdays), $8 would buy you unlimited trips to a constantly restocked pizza and salad bar. I like to think I never failed to make a profit on these days, as I would regularly have at least eight pieces of pizza (if not more; the pesto chicken pizza was the best, but the spinach and onion was a close second). Maybe my visits contributed to Armand's going out of business (my high school cross country team claims to have done the same thing to a Cici's). Although I brought enough costumers with me over the years that they surely couldn't have held it against me.

It could not last, however. Last fall, the signs began to accumulate. Friends of mine (several from Chicago), confused at my love of the place, cast aspersions on its quality, and wondered how it survived. One of them suggested that the busloads of tourist children the place would regularly feed artificially kept it alive, an assessment that is, in hindsight, almost surely correct. Another friend ate with me there on one occasion, enjoyed it, and then, after we left, claimed she had inside intel suggesting the location was doomed. I refused to believe.

In truth, though, I had seen the signs. The Saturday buffets were getting lonelier and lonelier; Armand's even raised the price (not that I cared; it was still a steal). This past January, I returned to D.C. after the holidays to find that Armand's had changed its Saturday hours and done away with the buffet on that day altogether. And then, on at what turned out to be my last meal there (January 15, 2017), I ordered my typical favorite non-pizza meal (pesto chicken pasta) only to be informed that they were "out of chicken." I remembered Oakley! and its twilight failures, and sensed only the same fate was in store for Armand's. And so it was that I, upon walking home from work one day, passed by the place, saw construction workers there, and confirmed with them that it was no more, another victim of the expansion of a certain organization (a Subway and a nice breakfast place also used to eb nearby).

Armand's, as it stands currently (original image here)

All of the criticisms of Armand's I heard may have been true (but at least it's not at the center of a conspiracy theory like another D.C. pizza place). But that didn't stop it from being a regular and extremely convenient source of perfectly edible food for me and for the friends and family that I brought there over the past five years. I'll miss it. In fact, I think I miss it already. Earlier this week, I had a dream that it reopened. But when I awoke, I found that it was only a dream, and that Armand's was still permanently closed. And it may be no more in the physical world. But this Armand's will forever live on in my heart...and in my stomach.

RIP.