Posted by Adam Kuban, March 25, 2008 at 3:15 PM
Gael "Insatiable Critic" Greene hits up Zero Otto Nove with Arthur "Food Maven" Schwartz as guide. Schwartz is, of course, the man largely responsible for blowing this place up with his newsletter account and blog post about it. Says Greene:
As for the pizzas that lured us here, Arthur is right. They are a model of brick oven pies. The crust has appealing flavor though it’s not crisp like my favorites at Celeste. The splendid buffalo mozzarella shows best on the Margherita with San Marzano tomatoes, though the Marinara with capers, anchovies and pitted olives is admirable too. And I love the untraditional pie with sliced potatoes, sausage and smoked mozzarella, as one would an unruly child.
Related
Bronx Pizza Mini Crawl: Zero Otto Nove and Coals
Peter Meehan on Zero Otto Nove [NYT Diner's Journal]
Is Zero Otto Nove the Best Pizzeria in NY? [Chowhounds]
Posted by Adam Kuban, March 4, 2008 at 11:15 AM
From left: A pizza Margherita from Zero Otto Nove and the Margherita from Coals.
When you're on a pizza crawl, it's a rare that even one in five places you hit up is any good. Last night, on a mini crawl in the Bronx, we batted a thousand. (If you're slow with the baseball metaphors, that's a 100 percent success rate, folks.)
Not that we went to even five places last night—just two. So who the hell knows if that even counts as a "crawl," but whatevs. It was our main objective—Ed Levine's and mine—to finally meet the mysterious DJ Bubbles, who until Wednesday night we had only known through email and his manic and awesomely entertaining pizza manifestos and reviews. Even if the pizza we ate sucked (and it didn't), the evening still would have been a success.
Continue reading »
Peter Meehan visits Zero Otto Nove for the Times's Diner's Journal: "The crust had little stretch or chew and no discernable yeasty or fermented flavor, except for the faintest sourness. (I mean that in the good, sourdoughy bread sort of way). The low-flavor dough combined with the moist crumb of the bread (even in the well-done one we ordered after polishing off our first two) put me in the mindset of naan and other flatbreads, not of pizza. Again, not a bad thing, but not what I was hunting for." Meehan also found the sauce too sweet. Slice visited ZON last week; stay tuned for the deets.
Posted by Adam Kuban, January 10, 2008 at 2:00 PM
View Slice's Bronx Pizza Map »
Food maven Arthur Schwarz reports on Zero Otto Nove, a newish Neapolitan joint on Arthur Avenue in The Bronx that has somehow managed to fly under the Slice radar:
Roberto’s has been a destination restaurant for years. Now Zero Otto Nove has become one. It is already, after only a few months in business, drawing customers from the hinterlands, and for several good reasons. Top among them, I am sure, is the Neapolitan-style pizza that may be the best you’ve ever had in the U.S., and better than many in Naples, as I just described. I know I am going out on a limb with that remark, but I know what I am doing. Well, I hope I am not setting anyone up for a disappointment.
Zero Otto Nove’s pizzaiolo, its pizza maker, Ricardo, who indeed has enough charisma to be called by only one name, like Garbo or Cher, is originally from Naples. But he last worked in downtown Salerno. He was making such good pizza in Salerno that my Salernitani friends suggested that the place he worked at, Pizza Margherita, would be a good substitute for Pizzeria Vicolo della Neve, my usual haunt, but which, in the summer, is way too hot and airless to be enjoyable.
As Schwarz explains, the joint's name is Italian for zero eight nine, Salerno's area code.
Zero Otto Nove
Address: 2357 Arthur Avenue, Bronx NY 10458 (Belmont; map)
Phone: 718-220-1027
[via eGullet, thanks to Eater Ben]
Posted by Ed Levine, April 18, 2007 at 4:45 PM
I arrived at Mario's one scorching summer day just before noon, weak from hunger. I looked at the menu, full of classic red-sauce, Neapolitan-American items. There was no pizza to be found. My waiter came over. "Do you still serve pizza here?" I asked. "Yeah, we got it," he said grudgingly, the way a Cadillac dealer might admit he also sells Hondas. I ordered my usual (large half sausage, half plain) and reflected on my rather curious interaction with the waiter. I remembered that when I ate at Mario's a few years ago, for a story I was working on, the fifth-generation owner, Joseph Migliucci, discouraged people from ordering just pizza at his fine-dining establishment. The pizza arrived ten minutes later. It was a superior pie: crisp, slightly bready crust; terrific fennel-flecked sausage from a local butcher; fresh basil; a sprinkling of Parmigiano-Reggiano; and a simple tomato sauce not overburdened with unnecessary herbs and spices. It would have been a world-class pie if the fresh mozzarella I had asked for (I know they make mozzarella every day at the restaurant for other dishes on the menu) had found its way to the pie. The aged mozzarella was obviously high quality and full fat, but the yellow color gave away its age.
I spotted Migliucci sitting on a chair just in front of the swinging kitchen door. I asked, "Why do you make it so hard to order pizza? You make a great pie here." He smiled and said, "It is good, isn't it? I don't have a problem with people ordering pizza at lunch, but at dinner it's hard to make money if people are occupying tables for four ordering pizza and soft drinks." Migliucci then went on to tell me that his great grandparents had opened Mario's on Arthur Avenue in 1919, serving pizza and other dishes from their native Naples. Before that, they had owned pizzeria/restaurants in East Harlem, Naples, and that hotbed of pizza activity, Cairo, Egypt. Migliucci's father once told the New York Times's Craig Claiborne, "My grandparents left Naples with my father in the early 1900s and opened the first Italian restaurant ever in Egypt. It was a success, but my father became restless and decided to come to America."
As I was leaving I implored Migliucci to restore pizza to its rightful place on his menu. He laughed. "You know what happened. The chains gave pizza a bad name. They open pizza shops. We're a pizzeria, not a pizza shop." So I'll let you in on one of the worst-kept secrets in pizzadom: They have excellent pizza at Mario's, the reluctant pizzeria.
Mario's
Location: 2342 Arthur Avenue (between 184th and 186th streets), The Bronx NY 10458 [Map]
Phone: 718-584-1188
Rating: 
This entry is an excerpt from my book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. To read more, visit the Slice of Heaven archives here on Slice or buy the book from Amazon
.
Posted by Adam Kuban, July 13, 2005 at 9:00 AM
About a month ago, Slice received an e-mail from a mysterious gentleman going by the nom de blog of "Lonesome Hero." "You might be interested in the Pizza World Tour I recently went on," he wrote. We were interested, but Slice HQ was busy, too busy to make mention of LH's ambitious tour of the five boroughs in search of the best pizza in each one. Shamefully, the e-mail went unanswered until we were reminded about it when we met the Lonesome Hero at a foodblog event. It's time for us to correct that oversight.
Lonesome Hero publishes A Year in Food, a blog "Documenting 365 days of dining out (minus the many meals I eat at work because let's face it, the Financial District is a wasteland and it'd be way too depressing to read or write about)." Why just one year in food? We don't know. He's mysterious like that.
In his own words:
Continue reading »
