By The Slice

Oh no what’s happened to Buy the Slice. I’ve been ordering from here since I first moved to Manchester as a student 10 years ago, I loved the fact that their 19″ pizzas wouldn’t fit through the door in my halls.
I ordered a pizza from here a couple of weeks ago and was told that they no longer sell 19″ pizzas so I had to have a 17″. When it arrived it was terrible, it has a thick bready base and a rubbery cheap cheese topping — this is the standard I would expect for half the price from Poppalinos (Oxford Rd) or those cheap places around Piccadilly.
I ate one slice of the pizza and then binned the rest. I then read the menu the delivery driver left and found that they now sell fried chicken and kebabs. Why not just stick to doing what they used to do really well — PIZZAS!

Americans, take note. We are envious of your pizzerias. We try and pretend that we’re satisfied with all the weird and wonderful crusts offered by the two guilty pleasures of the pizza world, Hut and Dominos, but really all we want is your enormous, bendy, 19 inch pizza slices. Those ones we see in the movies and on Friends. We want them thin, we want them huge. We want them now.
Thank heaven for By The Slice, a hidden gem that I discovered via Just Eat. As soon as I saw Chapel Street I almost fell off my chair in excitement, but unfortunately it’s a different Chapel Street to the one I live on. Probably a good thing too, I’d be five times my size if I lived near one of these bad boys. However it does deliver to my flat, so it’s just as bad. I haven’t broken that Wii Fit board just yet. Fingers crossed.
As Alfie has fabulously pointed out (I am impressed at that circumference coverage) the big pizzas are big. Bigger than your face, bigger than a bin lid, so big in fact that you probably won’t have a plate in your house that a single slice won’t bend over the sides of. Now that’s what I like to see. Thin, crisp and salty slices of pepperoni (which I don’t eat, I just like the smell) atop a gooey mozzarella topping with a rich tomato sauce and a barely there crust underneath. Bliss.
While Just Eat doesn’t involve the ability to omit onion and replace it with pineapple like I always do (VEGETABLE PIZZA NEEDS PINEAPPLE! Don’t mock me), you can get on the blower and tell them yourself, or risk life and limb (or feeling nauseous, in my case) and put in the comment box that you’d like to negate onion in favour of fruity goodness. Unless it’s red, red onion on pizzas is pure win. Or if you’re happy with the available varieties just click and you’re away. Ommm. I’ll agree with Sarah-​Anne, the All Day Breakfast option is not to be savoured, it is instead a drunken challenge. But seriously, if you’re in need of a huge gap to fill and feeling whimsical about the US, please try By The Slice. And curse yourself the next day for having no bin or recycling facility big enough to handle those ridiculous 19 inch boxes.

Like some kind of backwards anti-​ronseal this place doesn’t do what it says on the tin. It does not, in fact, sell pizza by the slice. In addition whoever runs the mixed-​up pizzeria in question completely misunderstood the concept of the decreased 15% VAT rate and offered 15% off menu prices because of it. While a nice and unexpected discount it floored me. It was like being back in GCSE maths again. Like Alfie before me, my arithmetic skills proved inadequate and I was completely unable to work out how much I owed the delivery driver.
What By the Slice does well is now a matter of Unilocaling record — it sells gargantuan 19inch pizzas and it stays open very late doing it. I would advise you to get one, they taste almost as good as a Dominos and when you’re finished eating (or at least when you’ve run out of room) you can run at door frames holding the boxes horizontally to see if you can get through. As a test of problem solving abilities and intellectual prowess it is second only to chess.

As it’s got to be the main talking point on the subject of By The Slice, let’s develop this 19 inch pizza thing a little bit further.
A large dominoes pizza is 12 inches, and here we’re talking about 19 inches. To me it sounds pretty big, but nothing to scream about. I figure if I can easily eat a 12 inch, then on a very hungry day I can easily eat a 19 inch right? Well, no. Turns out this ridiculous assertion has come about because of my terrible maths.
A 12 inch pizza has an area of 11.459 155 902 616 464. Interesting!
A 19 inch pizza has an area of 28.727 467 228 087 107. What?!
So a 19 inch pizza turns out to be over two and a half times the size of a 12 inch. That’s two and a half times the size of a dominoes pizza. For a fraction (not so good with these either) of the price.
Done.

By The Slice has been my final destination during a night out many a time.
Right up by the Printworks, this place is a gem at 3am. It’s far enough out of the way so that’s it’s not completely full of drunken louts but busy enough so that you end up having some random conversation with a drunken man that you and your mates giggle about the next day.
Anyway, the food, you will have probably guessed that it’s pizzas here that you’re gonna get. Funnily enough, it’s not slices that you order, it’s full pizzas. But they’re good. And they come in a range of sizes that suit everyone from 9 inch to 19 inch. 19 inch pizzas!!!
Cheap prices and friendly staff who even call you a taxi home.
Stay away from the All Day Breakfast 19 inch pizza. It’s bad idea. Trust me.