Arby’s pizza slider sounds great but honestly looks extremely unappealing

How do you make pizza look bad? You turn it into a cold and sterile Arby’s slider.

Arby’s recently announced the limited time addition of the pizza slider to their menu, which in theory should be cause for much rejoicing. Pizza is excellent and pizza-adjacent foods — calzones, pizza rolls, pizza bagels, cheesy bread served with marinara sauce — are similarly so. Even the recipe for Arby’s pizza slider should be inspiring: genoa salami, pepperoni, provolone, marinara, all on a slider bun. And yet. And yet.

Look at this thing.

It’s not much more inspiring IRL.

It’s a disgrace to the pizza name. The first and most obvious concern is the cheese, which should be melted, of course. Then, there’s the salami, which would be fine if everything else was fine. Mostly, it’s just the general appearance of the slider. It looks cold and sterile and decidedly a worse decision than other Arby’s sliders or non-Arby’s pizza-like foods. It looks like the kind of slider a child would put together playing chef with plastic food pieces.

Peep, instead, these pepperoni pizza sliders from a woman named Amy, yonder on her food blog, Little Dairy on the Prairie. They look delicious with essentially the same ingredients with which Arby’s is working. Or these pull-apart sliders from The Country Cook, admittedly a slightly different form than what Arby’s is selling.

Pizza is an excessively generous food. Even bad pizza is generally good and even bad pizza-related food is usually good. (By this logic, yes, it follows that Arby’s pizza sliders are probably still good.) So it takes some real effort to make anything pizza-like look undesirable.

Maybe it’s just a matter of the food photography. Who is to say. In any case, do better, Arby’s. Pizza fans are rooting for you. We’re all rooting for you.