Pizzeria charges $1,000 for a side of ranch dressing

If you've ever had the displeasure of observing Millennial humans in their natural habitat—an eternal line at an overrated pizza joint at 3:18 a.m.—you probably walked away with a slew of questions.

Do they know they're saying "literally" to mean "figuratively?"

Does music even have words, now?

What happened to all of the sleeves?

Ranch dressing on pizza? Really?

While all of those things should alarm the general public to the state of American culture, the last one has become a particular point of contention among pizza purists. Specifically, one pizza place in Dallas is doing its part to stop these pseudo-hipsters from desecrating the great American tradition of dousing food that's already not that great for you in a fatty condiment to obscure all of the individuality of the dish itself.

They're charging people $1,000 for a side of ranch dressing with their pizza and banning folks from BYO-ing it.

Basically, Jay Jerrier owns a pizza place called Cane Rosso. When he opened the place, a friend gave him a bottle of Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing as a joke and, when college girls kept asking for ranch with their pizza, he created a wall display with the bottle and an accompanying sign that jokes about charging $1,000 for a ramekin of the stuff.

How did the idea to actually put the display on the wall come about?
It was from one of my good friends who works at Pizza Hut in their innovations department. She comes up with some of the crazy things they do — not like the really weird stuff they do overseas, like the mini burgers on the crust — but some of the other stuff. Anyway, on our opening night in 2011, she jokingly gave me this big bottle of Hidden Valley ranch. It just sat in our office for a couple months, but as we were open longer, we kept having people ask, Oh do you have a side of ranch? And I was like, what do you want ranch for? To dip the crust in. Well, we don't have ranch, but we'll give you balsamic or Caesar or marinara if you want. It's weird, it always seems to be young, college-age girls that ask for it.

Jerrier's other pizza place has ranch, though it's not really intended to go hand-in-hand with the pizza itself. He says he's not militantly opposed to the pairing. He just thinks it's kind of silly and decided to make a joke that made its way onto the Internet and polarized people.

Reddit recently caught wind of your $1,000 side of ranch, and commenters over there went nuts. There was something like 400 comments in three hours.
It never got much traction until Reddit picked up on it. The guy's username who posted it was "brostash"! That's awesome. Sup, brostash? Every now and again somebody local would post something about it, but brostash really put us on the map.

The Reddit thread got pretty heated. It seemed like some of them were trying to paint you as the "Pizza Nazi."
Everybody [on Reddit] seems to assume we're the worst people in the world, like how dare they tell me how to eat my pizza! Dude, it's a joke. Relax. [Eater]