Still, it's entirely possible Domino's pizza has simply remained the kind of thing that you just think tastes good at 2 AM, when you've been not-sleeping during a New York weekend and feel like being fed by an over-earnest corporation at an absurd hour. It almost doesn't matter, because it's very easy for Domino's to start feeling like a pal on those nights when you tumble drunk and alone into a taxi and realize that you need to eat, urgently. You leave a party in Chelsea or a venue in Williamsburg, stumble into a car in a pile of your own unraveling frippery, mess clumsily with your iPhone for two minutes, and have a pizza ready to take to bed by the time you get home.

There are times in the life of a harried urbanite that such a thing feels like no lesser miracle. It's some idea you bring home routinely until, in true New York City fashion, you realize you've gotten a little attached to it.

The online ordering interface offers high design for the low-down. An utter lack of pretense and that impression of a meaningfully-earnest desire for approval pervades the entire site. There's a ladleful of quaintness: "Awaiting your delicious selections," it promises underneath the "My Order" header. Popular items are placed front and center in case you have "no time to waste."

You can even build your own "Pizza Profile" so that Domino's will remember Your Location and Your Store. There are always coupons available so you can find the "perfect hot online deal," and the Build Your Own Pizza utility promises you can "watch the pizza of your wildest dreams come to life." And you can, through a visual simulation that lets you customize the amount and color of sauce, the density of your cheese, whether you place toppings only on half your pie or throughout.

It feels a little game-like, and it ought: in 2011, Domino's made waves with an iPad game called Domino's Pizza Hero, a complex touch-based simulation that challenged players to learn the demanding ropes of real pizza-making staffers. The game fits snugly among the kitchen sims popular on tablet devices, and aims to be genuinely-difficult ----to play it is to feel as if Domino's takes the craft of pizza-making incredibly seriously. It's also a subversive, avant-garde training and recruitment device where skilled players will be prompted to apply for jobs at their local franchise once their reward centers have been sufficiently flooded with a sense of success and importance.

Not only that, but the app allows you to submit the pizza you assemble in the game to your local franchise to be fulfilled as a proper order. As such, the company's use of game mechanics and social media has always felt admirably on-point, a success you kind of have to respect when you notice that most corporations have made a tacky mess of leveraging interactive entertainment and social media. Even beloved GrubHub made cynics of its consumers by wincingly offering up animal memes to consumers who lose its random-prize card game, and suggests recent orderers tweet "I just got Grub'd by the Hub."