It was 7 p.m. on a Sunday –pizza time. It had then been a full three weeks that I’d been ordering food from the neighborhood pizza joints, and I was tired of submitting to their every whim.

No longer was I going to sit back politely when Pluckers said to me over the phone, after being on hold for ten minutes, “It’ll be about an hour and a half, sir.” No longer would I take it when Jimmy Johns was a half an hour late without even calling to let me know.

I sidestepped this second-class status of “pizza-orderer” by pitting three different delivery restaurants against each other. I ordered from Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Stromboli’s at the exact same time and decided to see which one would fulfill my hunger desires the fastest and the best.

Domino’s was first on my list to call. As I expected, they were compliant to my pizza wishes and gave me no trouble. Domino’s was my go-to wing delivery joint in New York, so I will always have a little bit of a bias towards them. The entire order of a large pepperoni pizza and one order of hot wings took exactly two minutes and was promised to be at my doorstep in 45.

Next was Stromboli’s, a place that doesn’t seem to be ordered from very often by SMU students, even though it is right off campus and can even be seen from the right windows in Shuttles. It seems no one places its pizza on the same level as the ever-glorified Domino’s and Pizza Hut’s.

Even a newcomer like me was pressured by the pizza stereotypes at SMU and had never before ordered from Stromboli’s. I was pleasantly surprised as they were all business over the phone. None of the tactless advertisements as they keep you on hold, no phony graciousness by the person taking your order, and most importantly they know exactly where McElvaney Dormitory is–not the case with Pizza Hut.

I ordered from there last, because past experience has taught me that they take a ridiculous amount of time to order (second only to Pluckers, which I didn’t even include in my experiment because their wait is outrageous no matter what time you order). This proved to be true once again as I was kept on hold for ten minutes while being transferred from one customer service agent to another.

After a while, I asked whomever I was talking to as politely as I could, “What the hell is your problem? Why can’t I just order a damn pizza?” The answer came to me in that same fatuous and high-pitched voice that had just been telling me “Please hold one moment while I see if we deliver to your area.”

The reason they can’t find 6000 Bishop Blvd. at the click of a button is because when you call Pizza Hut, you are not calling the local branch, but a “call-center” that could be located anywhere from Kansas City to Wisconsin (I’ve gotten both). Only after my cell phone was sticky with sweat next to my ear did they finally understand that I just wanted a large pie delivered to anywhere in SMU.

Then came the wait. I sat down in the rocking chair outside of McElvaney content to watch the deliverymen rush towards the door each one hoping that they would win the first ever “Tour de Pizza.” It was a photo finish as Pizza Hut arrived first, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, with Domino’s in a close second at ten minutes ahead of schedule.

I won’t say which I preferred because choosing between Domino’s and Pizza Hut is like picking between the Red Sox and the Yankees–each fast-food lover has his own predilection that rarely changes.

Last came Stromboli’s, 15 minutes past when they said they would arrive. At first I was disappointed, but quickly came to realize that this was a classic case of the tortoise and the hare–big-business pizza joints, versus a Mom-and-Pop Italian restaurant. I opened the Stromboli’s box to find the first honest-to-goodness New York pizza pie I had seen since I came to Dallas.

To me, this was far and away the best of the three. Domino’s and Pizza Hut are on an eternally balanced see-saw in terms of which is better, but Stromboli’s is clearly a cut above. (Needless to say, Stromboli’s is not “Mom and Pop,” but it certainly is a smaller business than its two magnate rivals).

Yes, the amount of choices at Pizza Hut and Domino’s is exponentially larger than Stromboli’s, and yes, they deliver in half the time, but the quality is not nearly as good.

What started out as a plot to finally have my way with the pizza delivery places and their time-eating antics turned out to uncover a flaw in our pizza eating tendencies.

The price differences are negligible, the quality difference is apparent, and the personality difference is enormous. This does not make that much of an impact except when it comes to ordering from Pizza Hut and having to explain that you live in “Sou-Thern Meth-O-Dist Uni-Ver-Sity” every time you want a deep dish pie.

After my experiences on that fateful Sunday evening, I will order Stromboli’s nearly every time I want some pizza (with the slight exception of a potential craving for cheesy bread — in my opinion the best thing on any of the three menus).

At the risk of negating my conclusion to the pizza trials, I found out after I had ordered all of them that it is possible to order both Pizza Hut and Domino’s online — a capacity which might sway the see-saw a little bit and put Stromboli’s on a slightly lower plane. All this, however, does not contradict the fact that our good old local Stromboli’s has got the best delivery pizza around.

Simon Lang is a first-year Business Administration Major and can be reached for comments or questions at slang.smu.edu