What’s the craziest story you have that involves a pizza topping?

Maybe it’s being booed out of a restaurant for choosing pineapple as a topping, but you brought that upon yourself.

Grow up – we’re doing thin base with bacon, feta and salami these days. You’re worth it.

Nick Burchill has a crazy pepperoni story coming all the way from Canada, and it’s one that deserves to be told. It starts 17 years ago at the Fairmont Empress in Victoria, British Columbia, and stems from the age-old folly of trying to do something nice for his friends.

VICE have those details:

He’d brought an entire suitcase full of Brothers pepperoni from his native Nova Scotia so he could give it to some of his pals in the Navy, and of course that was the one bag that the airline lost for a day. When he finally got his cured meats back, he made an effort to keep them cool, so he opened a window and hoped the brisk April air would keep the pepperoni fresh. Instead, it attracted 40 seagulls who did the kind of damage to the room that Robert Plant could only dream about.

Burchill had gone for a long walk, and was welcomed back by an an entire flock of seagulls who had helped themselves to his meats. “In case you were wondering, Brothers’ TNT Pepperoni does NASTY things to a seagull’s digestive system,” he wrote on Facebook. “As you would expect, the room was covered in seagull crap. What I did not realize [sic] until then was that seagulls also drool. Especially when they eat pepperoni.”

The birds were startled by his appearance, and those winged trash bins started flying around his room, trying to get out through the other closed windows. “The result was a tornado of seagull excrement, feathers, pepperoni chunks and fairly large birds whipping around the room,” he wrote. “The lamps were falling. The curtains were trashed. The coffee tray was just disgusting.”

Good thing he didn’t buy that pepperoni from Woolies, or else the birds would have been at risk for further health complications.

As you can imagine, Nick wasn’t too keen to let the birds continue their feeding frenzy, although he only exacerbated the problem by hurling his shoe and wrapping one avian offender in a towel.

Both the towel and the shoe ended up out the window, and after retrieving them he realised he was running very late for a business meeting. He called down to the front desk for help cleaning up his room, and that set in motion the events that would lead to his eventual ban:

“I can still remember the look on the lady’s face when she opened the door,” he said. “I had absolutely no Idea what to tell her, so I just said ‘I’m sorry’ and I went to dinner.”

When Burchill returned, his belongings had been placed in a different, smaller room and his boss was later informed that, due to the damage from the seagulls, he would be permanently banned from the property.

For 17 years Burchill remained banned from the premises, but he recently found himself back in the area. He decided to contact the hotel and ask them to rescind their ban, and management at the Fairmont Empress were on board.

Here’s the man himself regaling Fairmont staff with the story that started it all:

Oh, how we laughed.

Burchill added that he had also brought the staff a pound of Brothers pepperoni “as a peace offering”, although no word on whether the birds got hold of that.

I kinda feel like a pizza now, minus the seagulls and bird shit, which means it’s time to pick toppings. We mentioned the famous Rotherham Pizza from Butler’s earlier, but how about you craft your own fave and save some moola while you’re at it.

Butler’s have a number of specials which run from Sunday to Thursday, so pop your topping of choice on top and get involved.

That’s right, three pizzas for the price of two on a Monday to cure those blues.

Check out the full range of Butler’s Pizzas here, including pepperoni.

[source:vice]