Don Day gets emails. Not a lot of emails. Just one, maybe two emails whenever he puts something new on his blog. Except when Don Day writes about pizza. Then, Don Day gets quite a few emails.

Pizza restaurants are like sports teams. Almost everyone has a favorite. Almost everyone cheers for their favorite. And almost everyone likes to tell other pizza lovers why theirs is the winning pizza.

Recently Don Day wrote that La Cocina Creativa was doing the only thin crust pizza in town. And Don Day got emails.

He got an email saying Mare Nostrum did a good thin crust pizza. He got two emails saying Osteria del Italia did a very good thin crust pizza. And he got quite a few emails saying that Pizza Pig did a very, very good thin crust pizza.

So Don Day must obviously explain himself. In the Don Day dictionary, pizzas are divided into two categories. The first is thin crust pizzas. The second is pizzas with thin crusts. Confused? Of course you are. But no problem, Don Day is married so he’s used to doing a lot of explaining, so let me give it a try.

What Don Day calls thin crust pizzas are also known as Neopolitan pizzas, cracker crust pizzas, puffy and charred and blistered crust pizzas, artisanal crust pizzas, DOC pizzas and VPN pizzas. They’re the darlings of trendy Italian restaurants these days. There’s even a process where restaurants pay $2,000 up front and $250 each year to display a Verace Pizza Napoletana sign in their window. And despite Don Day’s dislike of all the foofarah (spelling?) that goes into this certification business, Don Day likes thin crust pizzas very, very much.

Then there are pizzas with thin crusts. These are the pizzas that have been around since shortly after the turn of the last century in North America. They’re the pizzas Don Day has salivated over since he was knee high to a chapuline. They’re the double cheese, pepperoni, mushrooms and green peppers pizzas that Don Day would have delivered to his door, three hours after he’d had dinner. Except for one difference. These days the crust is much, much thinner than in the old days. And Don Day also likes pizzas with thin crusts very, very much.

Now Don Day knew from experience that Mare Nostrum and Osteria del Italia didn’t make thin crust pizzas but made excellent pizzas with thin crusts but he didn’t know about Pizza Pig because he had never been there. You see, one requires a car to go to Pizza Pig and a few weeks from now Don Day will be celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the day that those who wear badges decided that the world would be a safer place without Don Day behind the wheel of a car.

But Don Day does have friends with cars. And just by looking in some of their eyes, he can see signs that say “Will Drive For Food”. Don Day’s friend Cactus Jack had his hand up before Don Day had finished the sentence asking for volunteers and we set off with Don Day’s Wife riding shotgun and Don Day in the back seat with his friend Pedrito, far away from the wiles of the steering wheel.

Pizza Pig isn’t far from San Miguel de Allende. We were there in less than 15 minutes. Watch very closely when you go though for the restaurant gets zero stars for signage.

At first glance, I couldn’t help but wonder what Pizza Pig was before it became a restaurant. It looks like a place Walter Ray Williams, Pete Weber or Parker Bohn III might call home. Way at the front is a bar that doesn’t seem to be used. Way at the back is a nice big kitchen. In between is what I’d call a typical looking Mexican restaurant, the kind that has white plastic furniture that bears the logo of a beer company, a prominently displayed cooler that bears the logo of a soft drink company and plastic tablecloths with a pattern that gets in a fist fight with any food that’s placed on top of it.

The first thing I did was check out the kitchen and, more specifically, the oven. One look and I knew which of the two categories of pizza that Pizza Pig would be making. The oven didn’t appear to have the capabilities to reach the required 915 degrees Fahrenheit required for that VPN certification and the oven was gas not wood fired. Pizza Pig would be serving us pizza with a thin crust.

So what to order? Well boys will be boys…sorry, men will be boys, we were too busy at first playing with our menus to even look but, after a few nasally oink, oink, oinks, we got down to it. There are four pizza recommendations: Pig Pie, Vegetable Supreme, Mexican Special and Hawaiian plus a list of traditional ingredients to create your own. There are three sizes, small, medium and large.

Now four normal people going to Pizza Pig might order one large pie. We ordered one large, one medium and one small pie.

We started with a large Pig Pie (it didn’t seem right ordering a pie with that name in any other size) and, to show that we weren’t completely porcine in our preferences, we added red peppers and green olives. The crust was, as promised, nice and thin and nice and tasty. There was plenty of cheese, and a generous amount of Italian sausage, bacon and ham.

We talked about the amount of tomato sauce a perfect pizza should have. “Some just paint it on”, said Jack. “Others pour it on”, said Don Day’s Wife. We all agreed this was the perfect amount.

“You know what else I like?” said Don Day’s Wife. “The cheese. Too often in this country you get tasteless Mexican cheese on pizza. This tastes like the mozzarella we’d have in San Francisco or Toronto.”

“And good cheese strings,” said Pedrito. “Especially, when, like this one, there’s enough of it.”

Don Day’s Wife, who is the reigning San Miguel champion in Italian sausage making (yes, there really was a competition last year), pronounced the sausage close to perfection with exactly the right amount of spice and fennel. She did say, however, that having both bacon and ham was a little superfluous (whatever that word means) and perhaps pepperoni would be preferable to the bacon and ham.

We talked at length about the merits of blistered and charred, crispy thin crusts versus the thin version of the traditional crust we were eating at Pizza Pig and agreed that, by a narrow margin, we liked the former. Jack even demonstrated one of the disadvantages of the traditional crust showing how it felt limp and easily folded in the hand versus the crispy crust which was like a crust on Viagra.

When I asked Tim McCoy, owner of Pizza Pig how he decided on what crust to use, he told me, “When we first opened, we tried several crusts. We actually had seven different doughs one day. We finally settled on the most popular with our clients.”

Our next pizza was a medium and we put Don Day’s Wife in charge of the build your own selections (special hint to men reading this: always put the woman in charge, then if there’s anything wrong, it’s their fault). She chose the pepperoni she’d been missing from our first choice plus two other historic toppings, mushrooms and red peppers. Don Day pleaded for anchovies and, for once, begging worked but only on half.

The anchovies were served as full fillets, all the better for Don Day to devour them in one gulp and all the better for Don Day’s Wife to remove them in one fell swoop. The mushrooms had been sauteed lightly (there’s no room for raw mushrooms on pizza). And the pepperoni was tangy and generous in quantity.

“Again this crust has been cooked perfectly,” said Don Day’s Wife. “You can use the best flour in the world…the perfect recipe for the dough, knead it properly and roll it as thin as you want but if it’s not left in the oven for the exact right amount of time, you’re never going to have a good crust. One minute can make a world of difference.”

Our third pizza choice was difficult. We all agreed that Hawaiian had no business ever being a pizza never mind a state (it was so much more mysterious when it was a foreign country) and this was without anyone other than Don Day’s Wife knowing that Hawaiian pizza had been the straw on the camel’s back in one of Don Day’s more serious relationships. OK, maybe that and her half-her-age lover.

So it was the when in Rome choice. For the third and small pizza we had the Mexican Special, a pie with cheese, refried beans (instead of tomato as a sauce), chorizo, jalapeno and raw onions.

“I didn’t think I’d like the Mexican but it’s great”, said Peter.

“This is like nachos on a pizza crust”, said Jack. “But I like nachos a lot and these are nachos supremos.

“Nice heat”, said Don Day’s Wife, who fears jalapenos more than she fears snakes.

I later asked Tim McCoy which pizzas are his best sellers and I was shocked that Vegetable Supreme was number one. Had the herbivores really stolen another carnivore’s delight. No, not really. Tim went on to tell me that people usually then add an order of sausage on top.

There’s one more pizza that I didn’t mention. Mainly because Don Day thinks it should be, like adult diapers, an unmentionable. Pizza Pig also offers a pizza that has choices of blackberry, apple, banana, pineapple/coconut or chocolate. Don Day’s theory is if you can still manage a dessert pizza after having savory pizza, you obviously didn’t have enough savory pizza.

It was time for Don Day to reveal something to Jack and Pedrito. There was a reason he was picking up the bill. Don Day’s Wife had been doing some serious gambling again. She’d been to Gringo Bingo and won a $200 peso voucher for Pizza Pig. Don Day thinks that Gringo Bingo (every Monday night at The Longhorn) is one of San Miguel’s most worthwhile charity events and thinks highly of Pizza Pig for their donation. Especially since it cut Don Day’s check almost in half.

At full price though the lunch at Pizza Pig would have been good value. And worth the drive (maybe even a cab) to wherever we were. Oh and wherever were we? Well, have you ever noticed that nothing in central Mexico is anywhere specific, it’s always on the road to somewhere. It’s on the road to Celaya, or the road to Queretaro, or, in the case of Pizza Pig, on the road to Dolores Hidalgo.

To quote Tim McCoy, “Drive 5.5 kilometers out on the highway to Dolores Hidalgo. We are on the left just as you pass over the railroad tracks.” Don Day will add that it’s also right before the left turn to Tabuado.

Though he’s never been thin, Don Day has been thinner at certain times of his life than at other times of his life. And he therefore knows the value of being thin. He also knows it isn’t really important what kind of thin you are as long as you’re not too thin. So whether it’s a thin crust pizza at one of those trendy restaurants or a pizza with a thin crust at a traditional pizzeria, they both can be good. And, like those emails that Don Day received told him, the pizza with a thin crust at Pizza Pig is very, very good.

Pizza Pig is located just outside of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. It is open Tuesday to Saturday from 1:00 pm to 9:00 pm, Sunday 1:00 pm to 8:00 pm.