I have loved pizza ever since I was a child running around Chuck E. Cheese’s, annoying the workers in costumes and dancing near the animatronic robot band. Eating it is a free pass to be a kid again. It’s the real life equivalent of hopping in “Doc” Brown’s DeLorean and gunning it toward your childhood.

The dish is so versatile, so hard not to like that it’s difficult for me to trust people who say they hate it. Going against this food is like cheering for the Hawks to beat the Mighty Ducks in their Pee Wee Championship matchup. It’s like rooting for gravity during Free Willy when the orca was jumping over Jesse at the seawall. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles loved pizza and they lived in a sewer in one of the dirties cities in the country. On top of their horrible living conditions, they happily fought villains on a nightly basis. Are you telling me that you’re better than those guys?

Now that we have some perspective, let me tell you about the last time I had a slice. During my lunch break Tuesday I drove over to Gatti’s Pizza on Ryan Street to get away from being an adult for a while. Gatti’s is popular for a reason in Lake Charles. The place is known for having a wide variety of unique menu options that provide a little something for everyone. The salad bar is incredibly popular and on any given day, it gets as many customers as the pizzas nearby. Gatti’s is a breath of fresh air when it comes to Lake Area pizza. It’s definitely a chain restaurant, but it still dishes out the full flavors common to those quaint, family-owned pizzerias.

For me, bad pizza is easy to identify. It seems to come with the patented cliches: crust like cardboard, sauce like ketchup, cheese like rubber. Notice I mentioned the crust first. All great pies begin and end with their dough. Gatti’s seems to focus on it’s dough. It isn’t too extravagant so it never becomes the star of the show but it is, without a doubt, delicious.

I ordered the sampler pizza which comes with a number of different toppings. The ingredients that stood out were the Canadian bacon, the mushrooms and the mild sausage. Pizza places have a tendency to burn Canadian bacon. It’s the result of lazy kitchen work. Gatti’s Canadian bacon was cooked perfectly, the bits of sausage were tender and flavorful. As far as the mushrooms go, they were surprisingly flavorful. The pizza I ordered was a small, which was more than enough for me. That isn’t to say I couldn’t have jumped face first into a bigger order, but I still had some other menu items to sample.

Just to see how far the talents of the Gatti’s kitchen can stretch, I also ordered one of the ham and cheese sandwiches. Much like pizza, a good sandwich is hard to mess up if you start with the proper foundation. Put simply, the bread has to be great. And much like their pizza, Gatti’s sandwich bread is delicious. It was soft and pliable, but had a crunchy texture in the places that mattered most. Everything on the sandwich was fresh, especially the tomatoes. They were full, ripe and delicious.

Whenever you find yourself eating pizza, odds are you’re doing something fun. People don’t eat pizza and file taxes. They don’t eat pizza and apply for small business loans. They do, on the other hand, eat pizza and play video games. They eat pizza at parties while watching football games. Now, go be a kid again. Order a Gatti’s pizza. Make action movies noises when you pull out your money and hand it to the cashier or delivery person. Eat it with reckless abandon and, for just a little while, act like a child without a care in the world. It’ll be worth it.Gatti’s is located at 3522 Ryan St.The Gatti’s sampler pizza came with a little bit of everything. The stars of the show had to be the Canadian bacon and the fresh mushrooms.