The man who launched a thousand memes sits on one of the red round chairs in the front entrance of Domino’s Pizza. He shakes my hand and greets me politely.
I return his greeting, feeling excited as I go through the usual motions of setting up my recorder and list of questions; it’s not every day that you get to talk to a local celebrity.
“We had a lady come in last year, and took a picture and put it up on her Facebook account,” Gurinder said. “And our head office says, ‘Gurinder, you have 1,400 likes on this picture. What did you do?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And this was only hours within the time. I just said, ‘I had a girl come in. She wanted to take a picture with [me].’ And by 11 o’clock at night, he said, ‘You have like 1,000 or 1,400 likes’, and I said, ‘Holy geez, I didn’t know I was that popular.’”
“Everyone knows who you are,” he added. “And the best part is, they can all spell my name right…because they can see it online. When I was in high school, teaching someone to say ‘Gurinder’ was a very hard thing, but now they’ve made it very easy.”
But that status has certainly been the product of a lot of hard work. Gurinder started out as a pizza delivery man in high school when he needed some extra money, and slowly worked his way up the ladder.
“I worked in probably about 20 different Domino’s, but this is the home one; I grew up in Guelph, so this is where I went to high school and stayed here,” he said.
Now, he typically works six to seven days a week to make about a thousand pizzas per week.
But is he really the one who’s making the pizza when his name shows up on your screen? Well…sort of.
“We have a staff of 42, so unfortunately to the students who see me online, they can’t think that I make all the pizzas; I could not possibly make all of the pizzas,” he said. “But I do make a lot of the pizzas that go through here, or I have a helping hand in the process of where the pizzas are, who’s making them, taking a look at them, finding out where the drivers are and letting them know where to go and so forth.”
Even with a fairly large staff, making pizzas for all those students is still exhausting work.
“When the students are here, a typical workday could start at 10 o’clock in the morning, and go to about four or five the next morning,” he said. “When the students aren’t here, I try to relax as much as possible, so I only put in three or four hours a day.”
Gurinder has embraced the connection that has emerged between himself and those students. “[When] we’re falling behind, every once in awhile I’ll go out and do some deliveries as well. We had a couple guys say, ‘Are you Gurinder?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And they said, ‘Can we have a picture?’ And I said, ‘Yes, that’s not a problem. I don’t know who these guys were, and they were still great, they were still respectful. You know, it’s a picture, so it’s not going to do any harm. And they’re only doing positive things and having some fun with it. And I don’t mind having some fun with everyone there as well.”
Gurinder gives this positivity he receives right back to the Guelph community.
“I have a passion for hockey and sports,” he said. “I’ve sponsored the B Team here in Guelph for over 10 years, and what we did with them was for every home game they won, we gave them free pizzas to the dressing room. So it was an incentive for the players. And one season, they won almost every game at home.”
Gurinder brings this sense of competition to his business, too.
“We still have a competition with Domino’s stores in London—you know how much Guelph likes Western, so we have the same rivalry. Even if it’s a storm game or a London knights game, if it’s a Gryphon football or basketball game, or the competition for our stores to be above them in rankings. We beat them two years ago, they beat us last year by a narrow margin. My goal is to kick their ass again this year as well. I don’t want to lose to Western, or to London, period—it’s just in our blood.”
With his name being so well-known in the Guelph community, I felt it would be selfish of me to only ask my own questions. So, for figuring out what students truly wanted to know, I turned to the epitome of Gurinder fandom: the university’s Yik Yak stream.
One student asked about “his favourite pizza. What the god likes, we mortals need to adore.”
“I don’t have any particular preference on toppings,” said Gurinder. “The best thing I like about our pizza, or any pizza, is the crust. The crust has to be nice, even, and flavourful.”
And for the crust itself, he generally prefers a traditional crust over a thin one.
Another Yakker wanted to know “When is the busiest time, and what are some of the most memorable orders?”
“Friday, Saturday nights,” said Gurinder. “The busiest time for pizza orders is around one, one-thirty in the morning. We will end up doing easily over 100 pizzas per hour during those times.”
As for the most memorable orders, he said that, “We’ve had so many orders that I don’t think anything is strange anymore. Somebody wants pepperoni in a heart shape for Valentine’s Day. We’ve had requests from boyfriends and girlfriends from overseas saying, ‘Hey, my boyfriend’s got an exam this Friday and he’s hungry and has no money, can I pay it on my credit card?’ If you ask the right person, go through the right channels, you can probably get it done.”
“We have lots of requests because of religious reasons…A lot of people don’t eat pork, a lot of people don’t eat beef, so we have to make sure that we use different cutters to cut the pizzas with. There are certain groups that say ‘I need vegetarian’, so we’ll turn on a different oven to cook it for them in a certain oven. We’ll take the toppings all completely out of new packaging and make the order separately. We think it may be an inconvenience, but we know we’re helping that person out, and nobody else can do it…It’s very hard to have a kid who may be gluten-free…and all his friends are having pizza and he can’t have one. So we try to accommodate as much as we can without breaking any rules.”
Ultimately, Gurinder is grateful for the support that he has received from students.
“They’ve been really great, very funny, and very respectful, which I can’t ask for anything more from them. They’re always understanding in certain situations when we can’t get the pizzas to them quickly, and I appreciate it—without them, Gurinder wouldn’t exist.”