Unfolding mystery of pizza box

LOS ANGELES — When Sookie Orth sat down to write her college essay last fall, something quickly came to mind.

A pizza box.

Orth, then a senior at Sequoyah School in Pasadena, Calif., began her draft with a declaration: “I learned how to fold a pizza box at the age of nine.”

She told the story of her yearslong connection with Pizza of Venice in Altadena, Calif., where she often dined with her family as a little kid. One day, the manager invited her to assemble a box. Impressed with Orth’s speed, the woman told her she could work at the pizzeria when she was older.

Eventually, Orth got that job — and it changed her life by showing her the value of hard work.

“Folding those boxes feels different now,” she wrote.

It was a particular kind of box. The one used by the restaurant features artwork of a pizza kitchen: There’s a brick oven, shelves stocked with ingredients, and, notably, two incongruous chefs at work. One is rendered in a lifelike fashion, the other is a simply drawn cartoon, his smiling face just a few squiggly lines. There’s a slogan at the bottom of the box: “Enjoy your delicious moments!”

It makes for a strange tableau.

“It is really kind of messed up when you look at it closely,” said Orth, 18, a server at Pizza of Venice. “Everything feels very cut and paste. And the phrase, ‘Enjoy your delicious moments!’ — what if I don’t? It’s like a command.”

Internet denizens have long been captivated by the box, which can be found at pizzerias across the West, including many in the L.A. area. Social media users have posted about the chefs and their different looks. On Reddit, nearly a dozen threads devoted to the box have been published since 2013, including one from May. The lengthiest had about 1,000 comments.

“Maybe the head chef is all business, but he’s got that WACKY sidekick sous chef. He may be saucy, but together they add up to a lot of dough,” a Reddit user wrote in 2013.

“One guy is high, and one guy is really high,” another said.

The “delicious moments” directive gets attention, too.

“I’m f— trying pizza box. I’m f— trying,” an X user wrote in 2020 alongside a picture that highlighted the tagline.

It has even penetrated mainstream media: In 2010, the Portland Mercury published a piece asking, “What’s the … deal with this pizza box? Who designed it? Where can I see more of their work? Do they have these boxes everywhere? Are there other pizza boxes that even come close to being this weird?”

These questions have endured. Digital media expert Jamie Cohen said online curiosity about the box reflects an “interest in collective investigation,” the type of which true-crime podcasts and docuseries stoke.

“People are just interested in how people figure things out,” said Cohen, assistant professor of media studies at Queens College in New York. “There’s a novelty in community. And food is supposed to be a collective experience. The box shows up and the majority of people throw it out, but some people sit and stare at it. They put it on Instagram, they make memes out of it.”

Amid a difficult stretch for L.A.’s restaurant industry, even the choice of which pizza box to use is something belt-tightening proprietors consider. And because the “delicious moments” box is inexpensive — restaurateurs said it costs them between $10 and $15 for a bundle of 50 — it has maintained a strong toehold at local eateries.

Jennifer Febre, co-owner of MacLeod Ale Brewing Co. in Van Nuys, said she appreciates the box’s low price, but only occasionally relies on it. Its presence at MacLeod, she said, “usually means I messed up and didn’t order [custom] pizza boxes in time.”

Orth, however, has only positive associations with the box. And she said she recently got a chance to pay it forward while working at Pizza of Venice: “I taught a kid how to fold the box and I said, ‘When you are old enough you can come get a job here.’ ”

A veil lifts

The box’s provenance may be unknown to some observers, but it is hardly a mystery to the countless establishments that use it.

The boxes come from Restaurant Depot, the wholesale food service supplier based in Whitestone, N.Y. This fact was noted 11 years ago in a book about pizza boxes, “Viva la Pizza!”

Author Scott Wiener explained how examining the artwork closely unlocked the secret: “The bottle of olive oil on the table and cans on the background shelves hint at its origin. Supremo Italiano, Isabella and Qualite are all house brands” of Restaurant Depot.

Wiener’s book, which notes the box appears only west of the Rocky Mountains, calls it a “cult favorite.”

“It’s the fact that the phrase on it is so magical and weird — and the mismatched chefs,” he told The Times. “It’s prolific: That box has been printed more than famous works of art. That box and ‘Starry Night’ — I bet they have been printed about the same.”

Jamie Woolner, co-owner of Pizza of Venice, almost certainly hears about the box more than most proprietors — guests regularly ask if the men on it are him and his business partner, Sean St. John.

“Many customers have said that I look like the guy in the front rolling out the dough,” said Woolner, who estimates he’s folded about 20,000 of the boxes.

Shrouded origins

Restaurant Depot appears to have publicly acknowledged the lore surrounding the box on only one occasion.

In 2021, the company posted a picture of it on Facebook, noting that “14 years ago, this iconic pizza box was created and distributed to our West Coast customers.”

“With everything going on in the world today, now more than ever, we urge everyone to Enjoy Your Delicious Moments!” Restaurant Depot wrote.

Below the post, a Facebook user asked who made the box. His query went unanswered.

Restaurant Depot would not participate in this story. After an initially promising back-and-forth conducted via telephone, email and, weirdly, LinkedIn, a company spokesman ignored multiple interview requests.

Wiener, the author, said it was his “strong speculation” that the artwork was made using computer clip art. “A lot of these boxes are not designed by artists — they are designed by people that are there … it could be an administrative assistant,” he said. “And then the box gets printed millions of times.”

He believes Restaurant Depot’s box is made overseas, which could explain its oddly worded slogan. It “fits into that uncomfortable translation category,” he said. “It’s clearly not a direct way to say anything.”

And yet, perhaps because of the strange diction, the phrase is more than just a gustatory command. It is, said Wiener, “So much deeper — and more beautiful — but in an accidental way.”

Chefs and restaurateurs laid out a variety of theories about the box’s conception, even suggesting that artificial intelligence was involved. But Cohen nixed that notion: “AI can’t mess this up that bad.”

Still, the box has its champions. Adam Nadel, 40, owns Tramonto, a wood-fired pizza truck, whose pies are named for film characters played by Nicolas Cage. Nadel said some boxes are too flimsy. Others don’t effectively absorb grease. But the ones from Restaurant Depot get the job done.

Nadel said he goes through hundreds a week. So, he’s spent a lot of time staring at the mismatched chefs. What does he make of them?

“The guy in the back is like, ‘Man, I wonder what time the bar closes?’ ” Nadel said.

As for Orth, in the end, she didn’t write her admissions essay about the “delicious moments” box. She said one of her teachers convinced her to pursue a different tack.

“We decided,” Orth said, that “college administrators don’t really want to hear about folding pizza boxes.”

This fall, she will attend Bard College — less than a two-hour drive from Restaurant Depot’s headquarters.