Until recently, the only pizza I didn’t really go for was deep-dish pizza. The way I saw it, Chicago-style deep dish like you get at Uno’s Chicago Grill was an affront to pizza, an invader from the Midwest, not worth our time or consideration. The dough was sweet and crumbly, the cheese was too gooey and too much, and the whole thing was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike pizza.
One day, that all changed.

I grew up on pizza from Vito’s and the long-lost Phil’s Pizza Palace, and though I should probably be careful who I reveal this to, I was a fair way into my twenties before I managed to taste the virtues of Greater Trenton’s legendary thin-crust pies.

There was no transition or conversion. I’d simply never gone to, or been invited to, the likes of DeLorenzo’s, Conte’s, Papa’s or Palermo’s. (Actually I had been to Palermo’s, in Bordentown, but for me their signature pie is their Sicilian with meatballs, and that’s what I always got there.) It can happen, and did, though if you grew up in Hamilton, you may be surprised to learn it is possible.

Now, of course, I love thin-crust pizza. But I’m pretty happy with any kind of pie you can get in this area. I think I could probably eat pizza three times a day for a week and not be tired of it. There are so many different styles and approaches, so many different toppings, and I’ll eat almost all of them. I think most of us feel this way. We can be pizza snobs when it comes to thin crusts, or the very best toppings, but we can also be utilitarian.

We got pizza with the works a lot when I was growing up, so I learned early to be flexible when it comes to toppings. I usually avoid black olives, and broccoli, but I’ll even eat that from time to time now. I can always just shake or pick the olives off.

I know a lot of people who will only eat pepperoni pizza or plain pizza; I know a lot of people who won’t touch a mushroom pie with a 10-foot pizza paddle. I think you can learn a lot about a person by what they will and won’t eat on a pizza.

In fact, I think pizza should be a mandatory first-date choice, because when it comes to love, it’s pretty important to know what your life partner will and won’t eat on a pizza. I’ll bet some divorces could have been avoided if only two people would have been up front about their pizza predilections.

When my wife Amy and I took a quick Chicago vacation a few years ago, our hotel was only blocks from the original Pizzeria Uno on Ohio Street. We had dinner there, but as far as we were concerned, if we never had Uno’s pizza again we didn’t have a problem with it.

In 2009, we got caught in a blizzard on the drive down to Florida for Christmas, and spent a day marooned in Reston, Va., where the only restaurant that was open near our hotel was Uno’s. We ate there lunch and dinner, and didn’t even have pizza.

One day last month, I was watching some show on Travel Channel or Food Network or something, and if you watch those shows long enough you will inevitably see a show about pizza. New York pizza, New Haven pizza, California pizza, Chicago deep-dish—in fact, every style it seems except Trenton’s thin-crust seems to get some love from cable television. This time around, it was deep-dish pizza’s turn.

I must have been hungry that day, because suddenly deep-dish pizza, as viewed on the TV, looked like the most delicious conconction ever envisaged. That gooey cheese! That crumbly crust!

The next day, I ordered a couple pies to take home from the Hamilton location—they have a take-out special—and once I was home, we devoured them. My wife and I looked at one another: what had we not liked about this pizza before? Why the discrimination? We’ve since had Uno’s pizza two or three times.

This sort of thing has happened to me many times. Until I was 18 I disdained golf; eventually and for a while in my 20’s, I became obsessed with it. I used to curse, actually curse, at the radio if jazz was on; now I have more jazz CDs than any other kind of music.
I couldn’t stand beer, now I make pilgrimages to breweries and brewpubs across the country. I couldn’t stand coffee; now I drink three cups a day.

My change of heart when it comes to soccer tops them all. Gone are the days when I called it stupid or boring. Now I watch more soccer than any other sport, including my beloved baseball.

What’s most interesting to me is that in so many of these cases, it wasn’t simply a matter of me trying something for the first time and discovering I loved it, as was the case with thin-crust pizza. So many times in my life I’ve been enthusiastically entrenched in a position against something, only to reverse my position 180 degrees the other way at some seemingly random moment. With beer, that moment came one night in Boston at a party. With jazz it was a sudden feeling I had standing in a coffee shop in Manayunk. With deep-dish pizza all it took was watching a TV show.

Is there something about strong opinions that makes this paradigm work? If you dislike something intensely, does that make you likely to eventually embrace it instead? Does it work with couples? Do people tend to end up liking, in the end, people they strongly disliked at first?

Often, when someone says something like “I hate that, keep me away from it!” I find myself thinking that they should try having a more open mind about things. Of course, when I’m the person doing the disliking, my feelings are entirely justified.

But I wonder if it’s peculiar to me, this propensity to do a mental about face, or if it’s a common phenomenon. Maybe when someone tells me they don’t like something, I should have a twinkle in my eye, knowing eventually, they will come around.

Joe Emanski is managing editor of Community News Service, LLC.