God, I *hate* Nines pizza. I graduated from Cornell in 1989, having grown up on superlative thin-crust pie in Italian-immigrant-filled suburban NJ. The Nines serves what I'd call a mushy, undercooked loaf of bread with soggy toppings draped on top. And the food service there was as slow as molasses--you could wait an hour for your order to show up, creaking down that little dumbwaiter from the kitchen upstairs.

As it happened, in August 2013 I went back to Ithaca for the first time in 20 years to get together with some of my college friends at the home of the one of us who still lives there. A group of five of us, plus the two teenage sons of one couple, did a campus visit and then decided to go the The Nines for lunch. We got there around 2 PM, there were maybe 8 people in the place, and it STILL took an hour for us to be served a mushy, undercooked loaf of bread with soggy toppings draped over it