Pizza Dorks in Newsday

Posted by Adam Kuban, March 3, 2005 at 12:01 AM

A CUT ABOVE: Newsday ran a story yesterday tied to the release of Ed Levine's new book, Pizza: A Slice of Heaven (right). Headlined The Best Pizza, it featured pizza connoisseurs (above, clockwise from left) Audrey Aponte, Sam Kinsey, Geof Grayson, and Slice editor in chief Adam K. Pictured here at Peperoncino, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, these slice aficionados discuss the merits of a Friday evening dinner.

So, one of Slice's favorite food writers, Ed Levine, wrote a book. His book's about pizza. No surprise there: Mr. Levine is a huge pizza fan. Long Island's paper of record, Newsday, did a story on his book, Pizza: A Slice of Heaven and on some of the notable pizza nerds out there searching for sublime slices.

Slice's editor in chief, yours truly, was among the sliceheads interviewed for Josh "Mr. Cutlets" Ozersky's entertaining story. Also interviewed were Audrey Aponte, who with Tien Mao, has a website dedicated to pizza; the insanely knowledgable Sam Kinsey, who's at the heart of eGullet's insanely detailed NYC Pizza Survey; and Geof Grayson, a former Long Island pizzaiolo and current pizza consultant.

To read what the pie freaks had to say, click though the jump below.

To buy Mr. Levine's insightful book, click on its image above to go to Amazon.com.

The entire story from Newsday:

Deep in a distant section of Brooklyn, amid Hasidic Jews and Russian immigrants, I once ate the perfect pizza. It had a crisp but pliable crust, fresh whole milk fiore di latte mozzarella, mozzarella di buffala, regular Grande pizza mozzarella, padano and grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, all in proportion.

My search for the perfect pizza ended that day at Di Fara Pizza in Midwood. But for Ed Levine, the quest continues.

He is not alone.

Rather, a whole cult of online evangelists, unpaid but obsessively dedicated, continues to search the highways and strip malls for the perfect pie. "Pizza is a special food," Levine said recently at Di Fara, while helping me eat the perfect pie. "It matters to people."

The pizza-pie guy
Levine is the author of a new book, "Pizza: A Slice of Heaven" (Rizzoli, $24.95), which contains within its pages some of the deepest secrets and most piercing observations ever made on its subject.

Domenico DeMarco, the city's most venerated pizza figure, is the man I worship at DiFara, and Levine and I talked about pizza as he carefully grated low-moisture mozzarella on the slicing side of an old-fashioned box grater. Levine ate and talked.

"If there's one thing I want people to get out of this book," Levine said, "it's how rich and fascinating the culture of pizza is. It transcends class lines, race, gender, age." Levine, a big man, spread his hands wide and added: "New Yorkers are especially passionate about pizza."

But why?

Other foods have their dedicated advocates, their Talmudic controversies, their heroes. The disputes over barbecue alone could confound a scholar. But pizza seems to evoke energies that lie untapped when it comes to burgers or brisket.

A slew of dedicated New Yorkers scours the city daily in search of their grail pie. Although they may never find it, they share their findings with the world. Unlike Levine's book, a compendium of pizza musings by celebrated New York food writers, these pizza bloggers have no special qualifications other than energy and an abiding love of pizza.

For Adam Kuban, who maintains the popular Web site SliceNY.com, the site took root when he met another self-professed "pizza geek," Marc Bailes, at Martha Stewart Living, where they both work.

"I didn't start to be a pizza arbiter," Kuban said, but he says his site draws 7,000 visitors a day and is one of the first stops on any pizza quest in New York.

"We just wanted to create a site that would act as a record of our own pizza adventures throughout the city and beyond," Kuban said, giving some history. Each pizza record includes digital photos by Kuban of the pizza, and, in many cases, closeups of its underside, the better to show the char spots and bubble pattern.

Sharing the pie
This passion for pizza, Levine maintains, is a function of New York "slice culture."

"Pizza is cheap, and a slice is the first restaurant food you can buy on your own." Sam Sifton, one of the authors in Levine's book, describes this as the "pizza cognition theory": You eat a slice when you're young and seek one just like it for the rest of your life. As a result, New Yorkers will fight to the death about their favorite slice vs. somebody else's.

Geof Grayson, a pizza chef and one of Long Island's foremost pizza authorities, agrees. "New Yorkers don't talk about pizza. They talk about somebody's pizza. And they don't always agree," he said.

For Grayson, pizza-hunting on Long Island is a difficult exercise most of the time. "Most people don't care," he said. "But I look to see pizzas rotated through the oven to equalize hot spots, and I see if the pizza guy scrapes the oven with a spatula to clean out the black bits in the bottom of the oven. These are the kinds of things I look for. I'm usually disappointed."

On the other hand, many New Yorkers didn't have the good luck to grow up around great slice places; they came here as adults, which made the impression even stronger. Audrey Aponte writes and maintains a site dedicated to her pizza "field trips" on pizza.tienmao.com. "When I moved here from Vassar five years ago, I couldn't believe how great the pizza was. I had to find out more about it, so I started organizing the field trips. Not everybody wants to do that on weekends, but to me it was a natural," she said. "I needed to try the original [Patsy's East Harlem on First Avenue in Manhattan] for myself -- then I wanted to learn about all the coal-oven places."

Probably the biggest and most comprehensively detailed pizza quest is the ongoing "NYC Pizza Survey" at egullet. com, organized by the New York site director, Sam Kinsey. A bel canto opera singer with much experience eating pizza in Italy, Kinsey is obsessed with the Neapolitan-style pizza, in which thin pies are cooked in a hot wood- or coal-fired oven in three minutes or less. "What we're really interested in is, what is the crust like?" he said.

An ad hoc pizza club gathers for every trip, which is written about in excruciating detail and documented with even more digital photos than Kuban's reviews.

Crusty talk
Kinsey loves to talk crust, but he truly waxes poetic when describing the pizza of Patsy's in East Harlem: "The variable, fast emergence of air pocketing as it cooks creates a microscopic inner layer of indescribable pliability," he said to me rapturously one night over pizza at DeMarco's in Manhattan.

As long as there is great pizza in New York, there will be a place for the Cult of the Perfect Pizza to practice its ritual. Levine, though, went all across America in search of the perfect pizza. Is it possible, I asked the cultists, that they are missing a bet? That the perfect pizza might be somewhere out beyond our area?

Grayson thought about it for a minute and replied: "New York pizza is the best, I don't care what anybody says."

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