Link Roundup: Bad to Worse to Best

Posted by Adam Kuban, April 20, 2005 at 5:39 PM

'The Unbearable Thinness of Crust,' Idle Words:

... Back in the heady post-Soviet days, It used to be possible to get really bad pizza in Warsaw. Vendors in the little plastic booths on every corner would sell you a hot dog bun spread with tomato paste and pressed ham for about ten American cents. Then the Vietnamese showed up, with their cut-rate lunch specials and even smaller booths, and the Warsaw pizza market was no more. Finally the Health Department got funding, shut everyone down, deported the Vietnamese, and now the nation's capital is a desolation of McDonald's and hipster cafés.

You can find really bad pizza in New York, but it takes a little work. One promising place is at Penn Station near the A,C,E subway line (not to be confused with the good pizza near the Amtrak lounge). The slices there are thick and sweaty, and the mushroom slice in particular has a vague sliminess to it, as if the mushrooms had been eaten and rejected earlier by an animal whose diet consisted exclusively of garlic....

The most overrated pizza in the world requires a little bit of a road trip, to New Haven, Connecticut. Sally's Apizza (not a typo, just an affectation) is only two blocks down from Pepe's, a perfectly wonderful pizza place, and both places claim to have invented American style pizza back in the 1920's. New Haven-style pies are baked in a coal oven, and have a thin, blistery crust that is more rigid and less chewy than what you would find in New York....

But for the best pizza in the world, you have to go to Staten Island....

I do not know when or how Nunzio's discovered the secret of ideal pizza (it's the water, claims one of the pizza guys), but their hold on it is tenuous. Order anything except a plain cheese pie and you will get a very, very good pizza, but nothing like the Platonic perfection they achieve with their plain default pie. The crust is superthin and apparently impermeable to moisture, so the pizza stays crunchy and supple, and has little islands of cheese in a sea of really tangy, actual-tomato-tasting tomato sauce. Everything about the pizza is right - it's light, hot, has a nice olive-oil shine on the outer crust, and just writing about it now makes me want to jump in the car and drive back there. It is hard even in principle to imagine a tastier pizza.

MORE PIZZA NEWS
'Pizza with a fusion of East meets West,' ETToday.com
Sink your teeth into shark-fin and abalone pizza.
'Grill a veggie pizza this spring,' U-Press Telegram
About time a grilled-pizza story appeared for the season. Here's our take.
'Selectmen, police chief at odds over pizza tab,' Seacoast Online
Must not be much crime in New Hampshire.

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