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.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, August 10, 2005 at 6:00 PM
This is another week-old one that we neglected to post about during our renovation. The Daily News did a roundup of New York City's best pizzerias last week. As we told Eater, the new foodblog from the folks who brought you Curbed:
A nice roundup, I think. A lot of it is old hat to me, but there were some nice surprises in there, particularly a couple Brooklyn places (Graziella's, Laura's) that have been lurking one or two neighborhoods over from Slice HQ.
Irene Sax knows her stuff, and I agree with most of her assessments, although I don't know why she rated a chain Patsy's on the Upper West Side instead of the original in East Harlem. What's nice here is that they've really done a comprehensive roundup of the best places in each borough instead of picking, say, a top-five or top-ten list. It's a nice piece that's actually useful to anyone in any of the five boroughs.
You really should click through to the article and have a look at Ms. Sax's quick rundowns. For as long as we've been publishing Slice (and probably long before), Sax has been the News's pizza expert.
Here, we'll list Sax's picks and link to our reviews, when possible. When not possible, I, uh, well, I just offer up comments and such willy-nilly. Read on after the jump....
Upper Crust [New York Daily News]
The Boroughs' Best Pizza [Eater]
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Posted by Adam Kuban, August 9, 2005 at 12:15 AM
It's a week old already, and a lot of you have probably read this already, but the New York Times visits Coals, a grilled-pizza joint in the Morris Park section of the Bronx.
Peter Meehan, whose lede is built around the mispronunciation of New York Yankee Al Leiter's name, writes:
Coals is unlike any other pizza place in the borough - or in the rest of the city, for that matter - in that it looks for inspiration to Rhode Island, not to Italy. And the pies it slings are not coal oven, wood oven or oven baked at all. They are grilled.
Bill Etzel, the restaurant's chef, said he knew after his first trip to Al Forno, the restaurant in Providence, R.I., that is widely credited with pioneering grilled pizza, that he wanted to bring it home to the Bronx. He bode his time, working the pizza station at Waldy Malouf's Beacon and traveling with his business partner, Paul Harnish, to, in Mr. Harnish's words, "anywhere that served grilled pizza within 300 miles" of New York City.
Maybe I'm not reading closely enough here, but, uh, isn't Coals not unlike Gonzo, which has been doing grilled pizza since 2002?
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