Frankie and Mary Lou Cappezza, the former owners of the now-closed Corona Heights Pork Store, are my culinary E. F. Huttons. When they talk, I listen. So when they told me I had to check out Rose & Joe Italian Bakery in their old Astoria stomping grounds, I wasted no time getting there.
As usual, they were right. Rose & Joe's wondrous braided semolina bread has plenty of character and flavor. But as good as the bread is here, Rose & Joe's ultimate triumph is their Sicilian pizza.
In the back of the bakery a young woman sells slices: plain, broccoli, and sausage. The crust is crisp, slightly doughy, and surprisingly light. So don't thank me when you bite into your first slice of Rose & Joe's pizza. Thank Frankie and Mary Lou.
Most Sicilian pizza is just too thick for me, but Rizzo's in Astoria is the home of the wondrous thin-crust Sicilian slice. For 40 years, Joe Rizzo has been making thin-crust Sicilian pizza the way his father learned in Sicily. That means he uses homemade sauce (slightly sweet), full-cream mozzarella that lies ever so gently on top of the light—almost demure—crust, and just enough Romano cheese to give his pizza a little zing.
When you walk into Rizzo's, all you'll see on the counter are rectangular trays of fresh-out-of-the-oven Sicilian pizza. After years of maintaining Sicilian-only pizza purity, Rizzo's is now making conventional Neapolitan pizza. I can't tell you how it is, though, because I refuse to order it on general principle—I come here for the Sicilian slice only.
Rizzo's
Address: 30-13 Steinway Street, Astoria NY 11103 (Queens, between City Avenue and Dunway Street; map) Phone: 718-721-9862
At Denino's, the pizza box says it all: "In Crust We Trust."
They should trust their crust, because it is light and crisp and pliant.
Denino's is a classic red-brick tavern pizzeria (with a separate dining room), but it is just as welcoming to kids after a little league game as it is to middle-aged softball players coming in for a pie and a brew after a game.
I'm crazy about Denino's sausage pie, which features fine sweet Italian sausage made fresh every day by a local butcher. If you want to go vegetarian, try the white pie, made with mozzarella, onions, fresh garlic, and a splash of olive oil.
After 53 years, you might think the Denino family has gotten bored with making pizza. Not so, according to third-generation co-owner Michael Denino: "We still put our heart and soul into every pie."
Denino's
Address: 524 Richmond Avenue, Staten Island NY 10302 (at Hooker Place; map) Phone: 718-442-9401 Related: All Denino's entries on Slice
Giuseppe Pappalardo, an owner of Joe & Pat's in Castleton Corners, Staten Island, mastered his craft at three legendary Staten Island slice establishments: Nunzio's,Ciro's, and Tokie's. His slices are distinguished by a superbly thin, crisp crust.
"They're easier to digest," he says, "so you can eat a lot of them."
And believe me, I do.
Giuseppe's son Angelo has now joined him at the pizzeria. He's a serious chef whose last stop was at Esca in Manhattan. I'm sure he'll do wonders for all the other food at Joe & Pat's. The only way he could improve the pizza is to make it with fresh mozzarella.
It's not always easy searching for pizza. I had just eaten a fine pie in the outdoor café at Tosca in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx. It was really hot and muggy, and I was on foot, looking for PJ Brady's, which a couple of locals had insisted was just a few blocks away. I headed east on East Tremont Avenue. I crossed Interstate 295 on a bridge and walked two hundred yards. I reached Philip Avenue and made a right. The first house number I saw was 2800, and the numbers were going up, a good sign considering PJ Brady's is at 3201 Philip Avenue.
The houses I was passing were more like bungalows, and many had boats in the driveway. The boats made sense, considering that Throgs Neck is surrounded by water. A few of them were guarded by Doberman pinschers that looked ready to defend their masters' possessions with all their fury. When I reached 3100 Philip Avenue, my shirt was soaked through with sweat, and my heart sank. I was staring at yet another highway, and this time there was no pedestrian bridge to cross. I despaired of ever reaching PJ Brady's, where the legendary pie man Louis Palladino was plying his trade two days a week in semiretirement (see Alan Feuer's profile in the New York Times).
Salvatore Pollito is a pie man, no two ways about it. Ten years ago he opened a solid slice joint in Queens. Then, when he felt he had mastered the art of the slice, he decided to tackle coal-fired, brick-oven pizza, inspired by his many ttips to Totonno's and Patsy's. He has done that successfully at Bella Via, which, with its brick walls and big windows, is one of the more cheerful pizzerias I have come across.
Pollito had a local guy build the oven at Bella Via, and tucked it into the back of the place in full view of the salivating patrons, who watch as he turns out beautiful pies. Pollito uses low-moisture, slightly aged mozzarella, Italian tomatoes, and fine locally sourced sausage on his pies. His crust is fairly thin, bready, and soft and doesn't have much chew to it.
Bella Via
Address: 47-46 Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City NY (at 48th Avenue; map) Phone: 718-361-7510 Related: All Bella Via entries on Slice
If you find yourself headed to Madison Square Garden for a Knicks or Rangers game or a concert and you have 15 minutes or less to get something to eat, Pizza Suprema is the answer to your prayers. A mere two blocks from a Garden entrance, it looks like a generic pizzeria. Don't be fooled. The regular slices have a crisp crust, a fine if overly sweet sauce and a little too much cheese. Have one regular slice and one slice of the marinara pie—a Sicilian slice coated with marinara sauce containing flecks of fresh onion, then sprinkled with just enough Romano cheese to give the whole thing a pleasant tang. The Sicilian crust is thick but surprisingly light, with enough oil to keep it moist. If you're still hungry (and I don't think you will be) get a Roman slice, basically a stuffed slice with a crisp crust filed with sausage, pepperoni, ham, and cheese. After your stop here, you can go to the Garden totally sated, armed with the knowledge that you won't have to spring for the absurdly expensive hot dogs.
Address: 413 Eighth Avenue, New York NY 10001 (at 31st Street; map) Phone: 212-594-8939
A slice from Nunzio's is a pristine exercise in elegant pizza minimalism. It's not very big, so pizza-by-the-ton Ray's fans should go elsewhere. Yet everything about it is right: the ratio of sauce to cheese, the crisp yet pliant crust, and the tangy sauce enlivened by fresh basil. I love the sausage Nunzio's puts on its slices. It's nubby, loaded with flavor, and has plenty of fennel in it. Nunzio's even looks the way a pizzeria should: It is a white stucco shack with a tiny dining room brightened by black-and-white photos of the original Nunzio's in South Beach, Sraten Island.
Nunzio's
Address: 2155 Hylan Boulevard, Staten Island NY 10306 (at Midland Avenue; map) Phone: 718-667-9647
Posted by Ed Levine, September 15, 2007 at 12:00 PM
The first time I tried to have a pizza at Forno Italia, the place had been reduced to rubble by a complete renovation. I worried that the wood-burning pizza oven I had heard so much about would not be part of the new restaurant. I needn't have worried. What makes Forno ltalia's pizza so good is the gorgeous oven, a skilled pizzaiolo, and the house-made mozzarella, which is so good that the proprietors wholesale it to other Italian restaurants and pizzerias in the know. The pies are individual Neapolitan-style beauties, with a chewy, puffy crust that is pretty swell. I usually have the Margherita here, but I've always been tempted to order the Southern pizza, topped with spicy sausage and American and Swiss cheeses. It ain't exactly authentic, but I bet it's tasty.
Forno Italia
Address: 43-19 Ditmars Boulevard, Astoria NY 11105 (b/n 43rd and 45th Streets; map) Phone: 718-267-1068
The clock was about to strike six when I called Domino's. I ordered a large Classic Hand-Tossed Italian sausage and a plain cheese pizza. The woman who took my order was exceedingly polite and said my pizza would be $12.45 and would take 30 minutes to arrive. I checked my watch a number of times, and then, like magic, at exactly 6:29 p.m., our doorbell rang. How did she know it would take exactly 30 minutes? What could Domino's possibly teach its employees in order for them to be able to tell me, to the minute, when my pizza would arrive? Or had the delivery guy been standing outside my door for the last eight minutes, waiting for the magic 30-minute signal to finally ring the bell?
I have had a number of pizzas at CPKs all over the country in the last ten years, and though the pizza was never better than acceptable, I wasn't prepared for just how awful the pizza would be when I went into the only Manhattan location for a late lunch. We ordered the pizza that made CPK founders Rick Rosenfeld and Larry Flax rich and almost famous, the Original BBQ Chicken pizza, and a Margherita, described on the menu as authentic thin-crust pizza made with both aged and fresh mozzarella.
The toppings on the Original BBQ Chicken pizza—smoked Gouda, red onions, cilantro, and barbecue sauce—were actually quite tasty. But the crust was limp and flaccid. It had no charred black or brown spots. In true California fashion, it was blonde. It also had no hole structure and no yeasty flavor. The Margherita was no better. It had a few browned edges, but was still as soft and puffy as a cotton ball. Next time around, I will opt for a salad. California Salad Kitchen. Now that's got a nice ring to it.
California Pizza Kitchen
Location reviewed: 201 East 60th Street, New York NY 10022 (Third Avenue at 60th Street) Phone: 212-755-7773
Other locations: californiapizzakitchen.com/locations
"Hi, welcome to Bertucci's. My name is Johnny, and I'll be your server today." When I heard that, I knew I had wandered into a different kind of pizza chain. The state of the art Wood Stone brick oven I was staring at across from our table was another giveaway. It's fueled by gas, though there are other Bertucci's locations with wood-burning ovens. The first Bertucci's opened in 1981 in Somerville, Massachusetts. At one point, Bertucci's had even received certification from the VPN. These days its membership has been suspended because as VPN America founder Peppe Miele explained, "They went around me to Italy for their certification. We can't allow that."
Is chain pizza as bad as serious food people say it is? I was determined to find out—and determined to give chain pizza a fair shake. So, as part of my research for Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, I resolved to eat only chain pizza for dinner for a period of one week. I would limit myself to one chain pizza a day (though I was sorely tempted to get all the chain pizza eating out of the way in an afternoon). My wife, son, and friends were horrified by this regimen and reminded me of the fate of Morgan Spurlock, who famously ate nothing but McDonald's for a month. But if I wasn't willing to die for my art, at the very least I was willing to get a little sick for it. What did I find? Chain pizza is, for the most part, awful stuff. No news here. How is it awful? Why is it awful? What does it mean for pizza-eating people everywhere that it's awful? These are the essential questions that must be answered in any thorough examination of pizza.
Hey, Slicesters, Ed Levine here. If you follow this site regularly, you know we've been excerpting chapters and info from the pizza book I wrote, Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. Since Adam has been talking a lot about D.C. pizza as of late, I thought I'd post my chapter on the subject. Enjoy! —Ed
It was at Ella's Wood Fired Pizza, the first stop on my Washington, D.C., pizza tour, that I developed my owner-occupied pizza theory. I sat down at a table across from the beautiful, fire-engine-red, wood-fired brick oven and ordered a Margherita and a marinara pizza. I asked my waiter where Ella's got its mozzarella and sausage. He said he didn't know but would ask the chef, who was sitting at the bar. The chef then walked past my table on the way to the kitchen. I repeated the questions directly to him. He said, "I don't really know. I think the mozzarella comes from California, and the sausage, well, I don't have any idea. A lot of sausage comes from Pennsylvania, so maybe it's from there." This exchange did not fill my stomach with confidence; at the very least, a chef should know where his ingredients come from. Maybe he's new, I consoled myself, and his name couldn't be Ella. But there was no Ella in sight, and nobody else in charge.
Unsurprisingly, the pizzas were thoroughly mediocre. Much better than your run-of-the-mill slice place or chain, but nothing you'd travel even ten blocks for. Our next stop was Matchbox, which makes a big deal on its menu about its coal-fired oven and all the trips made to the great pizza emporia in New York. I ordered a medium half-plain, half-sausage pie, and asked our waitress where they got their mozzarella and sausage. She came back and said the guys making the pizza didn't know. Our pie arrived, and it was yellow, which meant they were using aged, not fresh, mozzarella. The sausage had a nice fennel taste, but the sauce was overpoweringly herbaceous. It tasted of dry, old oregano. The waitress came over and said they got their sausage from Sysco, a megasized food distributor. I appreciated her candor, but not the pizza. Once again I felt there was a pizza leadership vacuum at Matchbox. I was beginning to get discouraged about pizza in the District of Columbia. How could our nation's capital, full of college students, 20-somethings working on Capitol Hill, not to mention a hundred senators, 532 members of the House of Representatives, nine Supreme Court justices, and the president and vice-president not have at least a few solid slices? This state of affairs is unpatriotic, not to mention unregulated.
Über-chef, restaurateur, and television personality Mario Batali found out the hard way that even for famous chefs, cooking is easy and pizza is hard. When I wrote Pizza, A Slice of Heaven, I asked Mario to write about the difficulties of a well-known chef opening a pizzeria.
Words by Mario Batali | I'd always wanted to make pizza—not the regular, great New York City slices like the ones I eat at Joe's, right around the corner from two of our restaurants, Babbo and Lupa, or the great whole pies made in coal-fired brick ovens like the one at Totonno's in Coney Island, where we eat when Susi and I take the kids to the aquarium. Instead, Joe Bastianich and I decided we'd do a pizzeria and enoteca that would feature Sardinian flat bread, more like cracker or a lavash, that would be charred on a griddle. It'd be faster, different, and easier to do. Or so we thought.
Cooking is easy. Pizza is hard. That's the prevailing sentiment among the many serious chefs across America who tackle pizza in their restaurants. What used to be the province of slice counters and "red sauce" Italian American restaurants has now become required eating at many of the seminal American restaurants in this country. From Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, and Nancy Silverton in California to Todd English and George Germon in New England, it seems you can't find a chef who's not crazy about pizza.
How did this come to be? Why would men and women who have spent years behind a stove mastering sautéing and braising and making sauces bother with something so simple and plebian as pizza? Waters became enamored with the idea of making pizza after a trip to Torino, Italy, in 1979. "I loved the elegant simplicity of the pizzas that came out of a wood-burning oven at this trattoria in Torino. When you eat pizza, you get the experience of eating warm bread topped by all these lovely little tastes." When she returned she installed a wood-burning oven at The Café at Chez Panisse. The wood-burning oven is another reason she and other chefs love the idea of making pizza. "When you get to see the fire, it connects to the experience of the hearth. Not to mention the incredible smell that goes with it. Plus, pizza is incredibly affordable and adaptable."
I've always had a thing for frozen pizza. As a kid, I devoured box after box of Pizza Fours, individual snack-sized pies that unsurprisingly came four to a box. By the time I got to college, I had kicked the frozen pizza habit, mostly because we could buy pizza pretty late into the evening at Pagliai's and Ahrvano's. It wasn't the greatest pizza in the world, but I was in Grinnell, Iowa. I needed sustenance, and it was cheap and filling.
Frozen pizza has come a long way since my Pizza Four days. In fact, according to a May 2004 article in the New York Times Sunday business section, "In strictly frozen-pizza terms, the year 1995 was every bit as momentous as 1066 or 1492. Before that date, frozen pizza was a gourmand's worst nightmare: overly chewy crusts topped with bland sauce, rubbery cheese, and meat specks tougher than jerky." In 1995, Kraft Foods came out with the first DiGiorno pizza, featuring a rising crust.
According to Brendan I. Koerner in the aforementioned Times story, rising crust was a "food technology coup. Kraft's researchers were inspired in large part by three patents taken out in 1983 by General Foods of White Plains, which combined with Kraft in 1989. The patents covered the preparation and safe storage of frozen, yeast-leavened dough, a complex process involving the meticulous addition of hydrophilic colloids for stability and surfactants to 'facilitate flour hydration and initial dough development.' Kraft also developed modified atmospheric packaging, which keeps the pies bathed in inert gas rather than oxygen, which erodes the dough."
My son, Will, has introduced me to DiGiorno Rising Crust Pizzas (and their fierce competitor, Freschetta, which introduced a similar product a year later, in 1996) and while they are marginally better than the Pizza Fours of my youth, they are not as good as the slices I can get from any of a dozen pizzerias within three blocks of my Manhattan apartment. But, as someone who works at Freschetta told me, New York is the single worst frozen-pizza market in the country, because of the number of high-quality independently owned pizza shops in Gotham.
Editor's note: My friend and neighbor Brian Koppelman (writer of Ocean's 13, among others) loves pizza with designer toppings, for which he gives an impassioned defense here. It's an excerpt from my book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven.
Words by Brian Koppelman | MY FATHER, WHO FIRST INTRODUCED ME TO PIZZA, IS A PURIST. To him, a pie isn't legit unless it's built like the ones he ate during his high school years in Far Rockaway, Queens. Out there, among the row houses by the Atlantic Ocean, the neighborhood joints served it straight up: crisp crust, tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella. Maybe a sprinkle of Parmesan. That's all. No pesto. No goat cheese. Definitely no pineapple. That's how my oId man liked it. He's still a no-nonsense guy. I, however, am a fop hooked on "gourmet" pizza.
Bar (or tavern) pizza is an entity unto itself within the pizza realm. It's been around at least since Prohibition ended in 1933, but who knows, maybe there was a speakeasy serving pizza. It is served all over the country, although I have found a preponderance of bar pizza in New Jersey; Staten Island, New York; Chicago; and Connecticut.
What defines a bar pizzeria? They're usually family-run businesses that have been passed down from generation to generation. It's pizza served in a bar (of course), which means minors are not let in unaccompanied by adults. At Vito & Nick's on Chicago's far South Side, a sign on the door greets all perspective customers with that very message. Bar pizza is served by waiters, waitresses, and bartenders who, let's just say, have been around the pizza oven more than a few times. They may make you feel welcome, but only after sizing you up for a full minute. They usually have a twinkle in their eye that's not immediately discernible, and more than a little bit of attitude. A bar pizzeria likely has plastic tablecloths if it has any tablecloths at all. There's a good chance that the choicest tables are booths.
What is bar pizza like? It's usually very thin-crusted to (I'm guessing) leave plenty of room in the eater's stomach for beer. It's baked in a gas oven that may have replaced a coal oven if the bar is old enough. Bar pizza is made with decent, commercial, aged mozzarella and comes topped with canned mushrooms, standard pepperoni and, if you're lucky, house-made sausage. You will not find any fancy-pants ingredients or toppings in or on a bar pizza, although at the Brü Rm. at Bar in New Haven, Connecticut, they have created a yuppie, postmodern bar pizzeria that serves things like mashed-potato pizza and blonde ale. It's actually good pizza and good beer, but somehow it seems antithetical to the original idea of bar pizza.
It makes my heart sing when I walk into a pizzeria and see the glow of burning wood logs in a brick oven. Patricia's serves pizza made either in the aforementioned wood-burning oven or a gas oven. The pizza is the same price, so why anyone would order a pie made in the gas oven is beyond me. My Margherita had the most tender pizza crust I've had east of Phoenix. It had virtually no crunch, but it had the texture and consistency of fresh-backed bread. The mozzarella was fresh, as was the basil, and the tomato sauce wasn't gummed up by too many spices. The sausage, oblong strips cut lengthwise from what must have been a fat link, had a clean porky flavor. The menu here proclaims, "the Best Sicilian Pizza in New York City!" Though I appreciated both the fresh mozzarella and the smoky taste the wood-burning oven imparts to the thick Sicilian crust, this claim could not be substantiated by the half pie I had. I though the crust would have used a bit more olive oil. The menu at Patricia's has a zillion items on it, everything from Rigatoni PavarottiPavarotti to T-bone steak, but I've never had anything except the pizza—from the wood-burning brick oven, not the gas oven.
At Tosca, the servers wear polo shirts that say "Coal oven pizza since 1922." I was skeptical, because neither my Bronx-born relatives nor my Bronx pizza mavens can recall having a pizza here until a couple of years ago. No matter. I ordered my pizza with fresh mozzarella and sausage on half and went back to check out the coal oven. Sure enough, there it was, a white- and black-tiled beauty that looked as if it had been there for a long time. I wandered back to my outdoor table and waited for my pizza. It arrived in a few minutes, and as soon as I took a look, I knew it was a serious pie.
The snow-white mozzarella had little brown blisters, and the crust had charred brown and black spots. I wished the crust had a little more salt in it, and it was a little too crisp for my taste, but this was a fine pie, nonetheless. I'd been living in New York for thirty years as an adult, and somehow Tosca (or whatever it had been called before this) had escaped my attention. My loss.
Tosca Cafe Address: 4038 East Tremont Avenue (at the corner of Miles Avenue), Bronx NY 10465 Phone: 718-239-3300 Rating: Related:Tosca review (1/3/2006)
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:
In planning Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, I originally envisioned a chapter on "beach pizza," for pizzerias found along the boardwalk in places such as Ocean City and Atlantic City in New Jersey, and Rehobeth, Delaware. I eventually nixed the idea because my research revealed that most beach pizza is pretty awful (there are exceptions along the Jersey Shore that are written about elsewhere in the book). Another exception that I had to include is New Park Pizzeria, located in Howard Beach, Queens, right next to Kennedy Airport.
New Park Pizzeria is the paradigm of a beach pizza joint. You order at the counter and take your slices to the outdoor eating patio in front of the restaurant. There's a small heated room in the back where people eat their pizza in cold weather. The guys behind the counter are invariably teenagers from the 'hood, and they wear their baseball caps backward, but don't be alarmed; they're reasonably friendly. The pizza comes out of a super-hot gas oven that produces charred-on-the-bottom, crisp-crusted slices topped with just a little too much good commercial mozzarella.
New Park Pizzeria
Address: 156-71 Cross Bay Boulevard, Howard Beach NY (at the corner of 157th Street; map) Phone: 718-641-3082
Note: Many people know New Park Pizzeria as the scene of a really ugly racial incident in December 1986, when four black men came to the pizzeria looking for a phone to call a service station because their car had broken down. They were chased out of the pizzeria by a group of white teenagers and beaten with baseball bats and a tree limb. They ran onto the nearby Shore Parkway, where one of them was killed by a passing car. That was years ago, and though I don't think the NAACP is holding any meetings in Howard Beach, nobody working in the pizzeria was ever accused of any wrongdoing.
Wassup, Homeslices? Adam here. I arrived at at Serious Eats–Slice world headquarters this morning, sat down at my desk, and before I could do even a lick of work, the bossman, Ed Levine, started badgering me: "Whatever happened to the excerpts of my pizza book you were posting? I haven't seen one on Slice in ages."
City officials know a good slice of pizza when they see one: The street in front of Louie and Ernie's has been renamed Ernie Ottuso Square, after one of the owners. A Louie and Ernie's slice is a diminutive triangle of pizza pleasure in which grated cheese and full-cream mozzarella sparingly cover a thin-enough crust. Also worth the calories and the trip are the fried calzone and the white pie, both made with ricotta. The white pie, in particular, is Louie and Ernie's pièce de résistance. The overflowing ricotta was so sweet and creamy I could have had it for dessert. The mozzarella on it was clearly full cream, and there wasn't even a hint of tomato sauce on it. This was serious pizza. A word to the wise: Don't arrive too late. The pizzeria ends its day when the dough is gone. "We run out, we run out ... that's it," says John Tiso, an owner. "We close."
LOUIE AND ERNIE'S Phone: 718-829-6230 Location: 1300 Crosby Avenue (at Waterbury Avenue), Bronx NY 10461 [map] Rating:
Posted by Adam Kuban, October 15, 2006 at 12:00 PM
Manetta's is in a section of Queens I call the pizza triangle: cornered by Long Island City, Astoria, and Forest Hills. It's also a stone's throw from Silvercup Studios, where they shoot The Sopranos. If Tony and Carmela and Dr. Melfi are in the mood for pizza, they call over to Manetta's. So if your pizza order is backed up at lunch, chances are it's because the cast of The Sopranos has placed an order for 50 pies. Don't complain, if you know what's good for you. You may end up like Adriana or Steve Buscemi's Tony B.
Manetta's owner, Mario Manetta, built his oven with his own two hands, so when I asked how it worked, the pie man working that day said, "Ask the boss. He built it." The oven is in the back of the room you walk into off the street, past the display case of desserts and antipasti and salads.
Mario's pizzas are Roman-style individual pies, ultra crisp and very thin. He uses delectable mozzarella made in the neighborhood at Spatola, and sauce he strains himself from San Marzano tomatoes. Mercifully, he goes fairly light on the cheese, thereby achieving a fine balance on his pies between sauce and cheese and crust.
Manetta's is a full-service Italian restaurant, but I couldn't tell you how the rest of the food is. I've never had anything but the pizza (well, OK, I've also had a piece of pretty good cheesecake and a delicious rice pudding studded with macerated Italian cherries trom Mario's hometown of Monte Casino in Italy).
Manetta's
Address: 10-76 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City NY (Queens, 49th Avenue; map) Phone: 718-786-6171
Caioti Pizza Café's Ed LaDou is a certified California pizza pioneer. He moved his nondescript, unassuming pizzeria from Laurel Canyon to its current Studio City location a few years ago, and he's never looked back. LaDou is a pizza toppings master. His barbecued chicken pizza will make it impossible to eat the pale imitation at a California Pizza Kitchen ever again. His toppings, which feature roast garlic, bacon, shallots, and lamb sausage, let you know that there is a serious culinary mind at work here. The only thing that's slightly disappointing at Caioti is the crust. It's a perfectly OK, thinnish crust that somewhat surprisingly comes out of a conventional gas-fired oven, but it's not unlike crust you've had a many other pizza places. Toppings this good created by someone as talented as LaDou deserve a better crust.
At his friend Maurizio DeRosa's urging, Celeste chef Giancarlo Quadalti set out to make authentic Neapolitan pizza in the gorgeous wood-burning oven installed in the corner of his restaurant. A year later, DeRosa concluded that New Yorkers didn't want the real thing. "It was too wet for people. People would take napkins and blot the pizza to absorb moisture. We were devastated. We would look and suffer in silence."
But after an appropriate mourning period, Quadalti made the necessary adjustments. Now Quadalti drains the tomatoes just the way many American pizzaioli do. As a result, Celeste's pizza is probably not authentically Neapolitan, but it is quite delicious and Italian in conception. That means they use double-zero Italian flour, imported canned tomatoes (drained), and excellent cow's-milk mozzarella, imported from Maspeth, Queens. The crust is a little crisper than any I found in Naples, but trust me, Giancarlo, that's the way we like it. I usually have either the Margherita or a marinara (made with tomato sauce and anchovies here), but sometimes I get crazy and order the one with prosciutto and arugula. It doesn't matter what pizza you eat at Celeste. They're all delicious. After devouring your pie, it is imperative that you have gelato for dessert at Celeste. They're all made by the mad-genius gelato maker, Gino Cammarata, from the tragically shuttered restaurant Bussola. If you're with a group, have the "porcini mushroom" ice cream, made with hazelnut ice cream and chocolate sauce in the shape of, yes, a porcini mushroom.
CELESTE Location: 502 Amsterdam Ave. (84th/85th), New York NY Phone: 212-874-4559 Ed's Rating: 3 pies (out of a possible 4)
Ed Levine is a regular contributor to the New York Times Dining section and is author of New York Eats and New York Eats More. He also maintains a blog: Ed Levine Eats. This entry is an excerpt from his book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, published on Slice through special arrangement.
Brio Forno is one of those generically sleek restaurants on New York's tony Upper East Side that I would have never walked into without a nudge from Simon Dean, one of the managing partners of the terrific Italian fish restaurant Esca. (Full disclosure: I am writing a book with Esca partner/chef Dave Pasternack.) He said, "Ed, I just wandered into Brio Forno with a friend, and we had a terrific pizza and an even better calzone." He didn't tell me about the stunning photos of gorgeous women that greet you from the wall as you walk in the door. Stunning photos of gorgeous women enhance the pizza-eating experience every time.
The other thing you notice at Brio Forno is the colorful, geometrically shaped pizza oven tucked into the corner. The pile of hardwood stored right beneath the oven indicates that Brio's oven is the real, wood-burning deal. I sat down at the counter right in front of the oven because I wanted to observe the pizzaiolo in action. I ordered a Margherita and a calzone and watched Andreas Rinaldi, who learned to make pizza in his native Buenos Aires, do his thing. He stretched the dough for the Margherita first, and carefully put some fior di latte imported from Naples on top of the finest-quality imported La Valle tomatoes. He used the same dough for the calzone, which he filled with the fior di latte, ricotta, prosciutto cotto (roast ham), and champignon mushrooms. A few minutes later Rinaldi slid them out of the oven and onto plates. The pizza was very fine, with a crisp, chewy slightly blackened crust. The sauce was clean tasting; the mozzarella just creamy enough. It would have been a perfect pizza if the outer rim had just puffed up a little more. The Calzone was almost too hefty to eat, but was tasty and substantial.
I asked Brio chef Massimo Carbone about his pizza: "There are no secrets to making good Neapolitan pizza. We use Caputo double-zero flour from Italy. It costs twice as much as American flour, but you really need it to make this style of pizza. The La Valle tomatoes are the best tomatoes to use for pizza. Even Mario Batali uses them. The fior di latte comes from Italy in two-kilo bricks. It's right for the pizza, but we use mozzarella di bufala for the Caprese salad. The oven comes from Italy. We use hickory and oak. The pizzas cook for only three minutes because they are backing at seven hundred degrees. Our customers are half neighborhood people, and half Italians visiting or staying in the city for a while. They appreciate what we do. We make them happy. There is one thing I won't do for anyone, however. We don't put pineapple on our pizza."
BRIO FORNO Location: 135 East 61st Street, New York NY 10021 Phone: 212-980-2300 Ed's Rating: 2.5 pies (out of a possible 4)
Ed Levine is a regular contributor to the New York Times Dining section and is author of New York Eats and New York Eats More. He also maintains a blog: Ed Levine Eats. This entry is an excerpt from his book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, published on Slice through special arrangement.
PATSY'S AND ANGELO'S
As Eric Asimov points out in his story on New York pizza families, both the Patsy's minichain (six locations and counting) and the two Angelo's are owned by relatives of Angelo Angelis, the elder statesman of the family that is playing a crucial role in upholding New York pizza values and tradition. Mr. Angelis should be very proud of what he's wrought at Patsy's and Angelo's. Seven of the eight locations use a coal-fired brick oven (only the Third Avenue and 34th Street location was forced by the city to install a gas oven). The rest of the formula is consistent: fresh mozzarella; superb sweet fennel sausage from the esteemed Frankie Cappezza of the Corona Heights Pork Store [sadly, the CHPS has closed since A Slice of Heaven was printed]; simple sauce of canned and strained tomatoes; and a consistent charred crust that has a properly thin layer of crunch on the top and bottom that gives way to a softer, slightly bready interior.
These eight pizzerias make pizza I'm happy to eat any time, pizza I wholeheartedly recommend to out-of-towners looking for a slice of New York heaven. And if thcre were a Patsy's or an Angelo's in every town in America, it would speak volumes about the strides we're making as a pizza-loving country.
NOTE: Because these pizzerias are not owner-occupied, there can be times when the pizza coming out of these ovens is not up to Mr. Angelis's standards. I'm afraid this is an inevitable by-product of multiple locations.
PATSY'S Rating: 3 pies (out of a possible 4)
61 West 74th St. (b/n Columbus Avenue and Central Park West); 212-579-3000
1312 Second Ave. (b/n 69th and 70th); 212-639-1000
206 East 60th St. (b/n Second and Third Aves.); 212-688-9707
509 Third Ave. (b/n 34th and 35th); 212-689-7500
318 West 23rd Street (b/n Seventh and Eighth Aves.); 646-486-7400
67 University Pl. (b/n 10th and 11th Sts.); 212-533-3500
ANGELO'S Rating: 3 pies
117 West 57th St. (b/n Sixth and Seventh Aves.); 212-333-4333
1043 Second Ave. (b/n 54th and 55th); 212-521-3600
Ed Levine is a regular contributor to the New York Times Dining section and is author of New York Eats and New York Eats More. He also maintains a blog: Ed Levine Eats. This entry is an excerpt from his book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, published on Slice through special arrangement.
Pizza and organized crime share a long and storied history. In the 1930s AI Capone decided he wanted his piece of the burgeoning pizza-industry pie. He forced neighborhood pizza parlors to purchase only his mozzarella cheese, which was made in a mob-controlled plant in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
More than fifty years later Rudy Giuliani made a name for himself as a federal prosecutor with the famed Pizza Connection case. Giuliani prosecuted organized-crime figure Salvatore Catalano and 22 other defendants of Sicilian descent, who from 1979 through 1984 imported 1.6 billion dollars worth of heroin into the United States and then laundered the proceeds through pizza parlors throughout the country. In the course of an 18-month trial one defendant died, and another was murdered. After six days of deliberation all but one of the defendants were convicted. Who was Giuliani's star witness? None other than Joe Pistone, otherwise known as Donnie Brasco.
In July 2004 the New York Daily News reported that the mob-linked Casa Blanca Restaurant and Pizzeria in Queens went on the market after a drop off in business due to the prosecution of alleged Bonanno-family boss Joseph Massino: "Owner Alfred Altadonna. a reputed Bonanno soldier who worked 16-hour days making pizzas at the Maspeth eatery, has decided to pack it in because of poor health and declining business due to Massino's racketeering trial, which played out for several weeks in federal court. All [Altadonna] wanted to do was run a restaurant," his lawyer Arthur Goldstein lamented.
Mr. Giuliani found himself in the midst of mob-related pizzeria controversy in 2004 when he recommended the restaurant Da Nico to Republican delegates visiting New York for the Republican convention. According to the New York Times. "When word surfaced that a list of top-ten New York restaurants induded Da Nico, a reputed Mafia hangout, it threatened to embarrass organizers of the convention. But as it turned out, convention officials had already taken the kind of decisive action that would have made Don Corleone proud: They made the list disappear."
Ed Levine is a regular contributor to the New York Times Dining section and is author of New York Eats and New York Eats More. He also maintains a blog: Ed Levine Eats. This entry is an excerpt from his book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, published on Slice through special arrangement.
New York is the king of pizza cities. Oh, yes, there are other pretenders to the pizza crown. Naples has its adherents, those who champion that beautiful city's high-lipped, slightly wet pies made in gorgeous wood-burning ovens. Chicagoans love their deep-dish pizza, and it is in fact a mighty tasty casserole, but one kind of pizza does not make a strong enough case for designating a city pizza royalty. New Havenites proudly point to the gorgeous, asymmetrical pies that come out of the coal-fired ovens of Sally's and Pepe's. Those are righteous pies indeed, but, again, you have to be able to show some pizza breadth. Pizza variety is why New York City sits comfortably on its pizza throne.
Here's the American Pizzeria Timeline, which includes only two non–Pizza Belt entries, Tommaso's and Uno's:
1905: Lombardi's, on Spring Street in New York City, is granted the nation's first license to sell pizza. 1910: Joe's Tomato Pies opens in the Trenton, New Jersey, Chambersburg neighborhood. 1912: Papa's Tomato Pies in Trenton opened by Papa, who learned his trade at Joe's. 1924: Anthony (Totonno) Pero leaves Lombardi's and opens Totonno's in Coney Island, New York. 1925: Frank Pepe opens on Wooster Street in New Haven, Connecticut.
Posted by Ed Levine, February 15, 2006 at 11:10 AM
You've heard of the corn belt and the rust belt. But what about the Pizza Belt, the part of America that gave birth to what Jeffrey Steingarten calls Neapolitan-American pizza. The Pizza Belt starts in Philadelphia and runs through Trenton and the rest of New Jersey. It extends throughout New York, Long Island, and New Haven and ends in Boston. Think of it as the Interstate 95 belt, with a few detours along the way.
It was in New York that Neapolitan immigrant and grocery store owner Gennaro Lombardi was granted the nation's first Ilcense to sell pizza in 1905. Lombardi's, in turn, spawned Totonno's in 1924 and John's in 1929 and, in an apparently unrelated move, Patsy's in East Harlem in 1933. Joe's Tomato Pies opened in Trenton in 1910, followed by Papa's Tomato Pies in 1912. New Haven was next, where a Neapolitan immigrant Italian bread baker named Frank Pepe opened his eponymous Pizzeria Napoletana in 1925, followed in short order by Paul's Apizza in 1932, State Street Apizza (now called Modern Apizza) in 1934 and finally Sally's in 1938 (founded by Frank Pepe's nephew, Salvatore Consiglio). In Philadelphia, Salvatore and Chiarina Marra opened Marra's in 1927. The Tacconelli family started baking bread in their Port Richmond neighborhood in the 1920s, though they didn't start making pizza until 1946. Similarly, in East Boston, Francisco Santarpio baked bread at his eponymous bakery until Prohibition ended in 1933, when he took over the adjoining storefront and began serving pizza. Seven years before that, Anthony Polcari opened Pizzeria Regina in Boston's North End.
Why did all these pizzerias start in the same 33-year period? What did they have in common? Did Frank Pepe work at Lombardi's before moving to New Haven? Here's what we do know. There was a tremendous wave of southern Italian immigration in the late nineteenth century. These immigrants all came in through Ellis Island, and then fanned out along the Eastern Seaboard looking for work among relatives, neighbors, and friends who had come from the same area in Italy. New York, of course, was where they landed, so it made sense for a certain number of them to look for and find work there. Trenton had hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and a burgeoning Itallan-American community called Chambersburg. New Haven had many factories (including Colt Industries), as well as a plethora of fishing and port-related jobs. Philadelphia (South Philly) and Boston (East Boston and the North End) both had fast-growing Italian-American communities with thriving commercial centers.
What can we conclude from all this? That the development of America's pizza culture closely followed southern Italian immigration patterns. If the southern Italians had come into this country through Duluth, Minnesota might have been known as the Land of a Thousand Pizzas.
Ed Levine is a regular contributor to the New York Times Dining section and is author of New York Eats and New York Eats More. He also maintains a blog: Ed Levine Eats. This entry is an excerpt from his book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, published on Slice through special arrangement.
Once upon a time, around the turn of the last century, pizza in America was an inexpensive peasant food, made casalinga (home-style) by southern Italian immigrant women in their kitchens. Adverse economic conditions had forced four million southern Italians to come to America by 1900. Descendents of all the seminal American pizza makers indicated their ancestors learned to make pizza by watching relatives make it at home.
In 1905, Gennaro Lombardi applied to the New York City government for the first license to make and sell pizza in this country, at his grocery store on Spring Street in what was then a thriving Italian-American neighborhood. In 1912, Joe's Tomato Pies opened in Trenton, New Jersey. Twelve years later, Anthony (Totonno) Pero left Lombardi's to open Totonno's in Coney Island. A year later, in 1925, Frank Pepe opened his eponymous pizzeria in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1929, John Sasso left Lombardi's to open John's Pizza in Greenwich Village. The thirties saw pizza spread to Boston (Santarpio's in 1933) and San Francisco with the opening of Tommaso's (1934), followed shortly thereafter with additional openings in New Jersey (Sciortino's in Perth Amboy in 1934 and the Reservoir Tavern in Boonton in 1936). In 1943, Chicago pizza was born when Ike Sewell opened Uno's. What did New York, New Haven, Boston, and Trenton have in common? Factory work available to poorly educated southern Italian immigrants. Pizza at this point was very much an ethnic, poor person's food eaten by Italians in the urban enclaves in which they had settled.
Posted by Ed Levine, February 13, 2006 at 10:59 AM
"The frequenter of the pizzajuolo is a careless youth who has no other occupation or who is occupied simply by sitting from eleven to three, provided with a strong stomach and a little money." —Emmanuelle Rocca, in The Customs of Naples
How far back does pizza go? A long way, more than a thousand years. According to Ed Behr in his Art of Eating newsletter, "The written record of the word pizza, in the sense of focaccia, goes back to the Codex Cajetanus of the year 997." Evelyne Slomon in The Pizza Book says even before that Plato gave an account of pizza in his Republic: "They will provide meal from their barley and flour from their wheat and kneading and cook these ... they [the cakes] will also have relishes—salt ... and of olives and cheese; and onions and greens." It's a bit of a stretch, but the idea of Plato waxing philosophical about pizza is a delicious notion. Behr goes on to say that "pizza is an alternation of the Greek word pitta, which was introduced to southern Italy during the Byzantine conquest of the sixth century." Slomon says, "The name [pizza] comes from a southern Italian corruption of the Latin adjective picea (peechia), which described the black tarlike coating underneath the placenta, a pie made of the finest flours, a topping of cheese mixed with honey, and a seasoning of bay leaves and oil." The first pizzas, as we would recognize them today, were white pies, made with lard.
In the 1700s, King Ferdinand IV built a pizza oven for his wife, Maria Carolina, sister of Marie Antoinette. According to Behr, in the 1850s Emmanuelle Rocca wrote in a book called The Customs of Naples, "The frequenter of the pizzajuolo is a careless youth who has no other occupation or who is occupied simply by sitting from eleven to three, provided with a strong stomach and a little money." That pretty much fits the description of my friends and me in high school.
Rocca goes on to say, "The most ordinary pizzas, called coll'aglio e l'oglio, have for condiments oil, a scattering of salt, oregano, and finely cut up cloves of garlic. Others are covered with grated cheese and seasoned with lard and then some leaves of basil. To the first, tiny fish are often added; to the second, thin slices of mozzarella. Sometimes slices of ham are used or else tomato, mussels, etc." The tomato, called a golden apple, or pomodoro in Italian, was brought back from the new world in the mid–sixteenth century. Sloman says that Neapolitans were initially scared of the supposedly poisonous tomato, but by the eighteenth century they were putting it on pizza and pasta.
Maybe the most prescient pizza observer was nineteenth-century French author Alexandre Dumas. In a travel essay, he wrote that "the pizza is a kind of schiacciata which is made in St. Denis; it is round in shape and made with bread dough. At first glance it looks like a simple food, but examined more closely, it seems complicated."
Ed Levine is a regular contributor to the New York Times Dining section and is author of New York Eats and New York Eats More. He also maintains a blog: Ed Levine Eats. This entry is an excerpt from his book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, published on Slice through special arrangement.
Slice is happy to bring you another excerpt from Ed Levine's book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. This time, Ed's trip to Naples. Be sure to click past the jump for a list of some of Napoli's—and Rome's—best pizzerias.
The pizza police, dedicated to the proposition that authenticity is everything, tell us that you cannot judge or taste pizza properly without having eaten it in Naples. Pizza wasn't invented in Naples (there have been flatbreads with toppings for thousands of years), but it is the place where pizza became popular, and where this perfect, simple food burrowed itself deep into the consciousness of Neapolitans of every class and neighborhood. Naples, they say, is where the modern pizza-eating rituals first flowered.
In 1830, the world's first pizzeria, Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba, opened its doors in Naples, and an industry was born. Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba is still in business, by the way. Fifty-nine years later, a pizzaiolo named Raffaele Esposito was invited to the Italian royal palace to make three pizzas for the visit of King Umberto and Queen Margherita of Savoy. The queen was apparently no dummy when it came to politics, so she declared her favorite pizza to be the one with the colors of the Italian flag: red (tomato), white (mozzarella cheese), and green (basil). Thus, Pizza Margherita was born.
Right around the time Esposito came up with the Margherita, Italians started coming to America by the millions, driven by the prospect of improving their standard of living. According to author Pamela Sheldon Johns, five million Italians made their way to America by the turn of the twentieth century, 80 percent of them from the south of Italy. Thus it was almost inevitable that a Neapolitan immigrant named Gennaro Lombardi would open the first pizzeria in America—on Spring Street in lower Manhattan in 1905.
Every food writer and historian worth his or her pizza crust has made the pilgrimage to Naples to taste pizza at the source. When I went, I was armed with clippings from many of the illustrious "foodies" who had gone before me—David Downie, Alan Richman, and Jeff Steingarten . To bolster my credibility and to guide me through that stunningly beautiful city, I persuaded Maurizio DeRosa to come with me. Maurizio is a Neapolitan native and the former owner (along with his mother and brother) of the now-defunct DeRosa, the only Neapolitan restaurant ever given three stars by Ruth Reichl during her stint as restaurant critic for the New York Times. We stayed at his mother's in the Vomero section of Naples, and set out to eat at the fifteen best pizzerias in the city. I actually would have gone to more, but Maurizio assured me that fifteen pizzerias in five days would be his limit. What did we find? Well, I hope Maurizio doesn't banish me from Italy for saying this, but what I found is that the Neapolitan culture of pizza is in many ways more interesting than the pizza itself.
What goes into a perfect pizza? The tangible elements are as follows:
THE FUEL SOURCE
In my opinion, coal-fired and wood-fired ovens produce the best pizza. The high heat given off by both charcoal and wood can char a pizza crust to perfection, and when coal or wood is piled directly into the oven it imparts a smoky flavor to the pizza. Christophe Hille, chef at San Francisco's A16, told me he believes that the flames, and not the wood itself, flavor the pie. Gas-fired ovens can also create a great pizza. Nick Angelis of Nick's gets a fantastic char on his crusts from his Woodstone gas-fired ovens. As he points out, pizza crust gets its char from high heat consistently applied to the dough, and his gas ovens can easily maintain 800°F heat. Conventional gas ovens, such as those made by Bakers Pride and Bari, can maintain temperatures of only around 600°F.
THE OVEN
How do you get an oven to reach eight hundred degrees and stay there? There's no way around it: You line the floor and top with bricks and/or stones to help maintain heat. I am sickened by all of the awful pizza places that tout their "brick" ovens, just because they have a couple of bricks somewhere in the vicinity of the restaurant. So next time you see brick-oven pizza advertised, investigate. Become a "Pizza P.I." Are those real bricks you see—or a faux-brick façade? Is the oven encased in brick, or are the bricks positioned only at the corners? It's the brick and stone acting in concert with the fuel source that imparts flavor. If you have an oven that doesn't maintain high heat, the pizza is going to be inferior, no matter how you slice it.
THE CRUST
I like my crust puffy, chewy, and pliant. A great pizza crust should be like a great football defense. It should bend but never break. The superior pizza crust is neither cracker-thin nor thick as bread. It should have a veneer of crispness and be softer and more tender on the inside. A great pizza crust should have browned and blackened charred spots. They lend a needed bit of smoky flavor. I love a pizza crust with a few of those raised blisters. They lighten the overall effect of eating pizza. The interior of the crust should have the hole structure of well-made and well-baked bread.
Pizza is as simple a great food as there is. But a pizza crust becomes great not just because of the quality of the ingredients, but also because of the skill of the "pizzaiolo," the person who makes it (in New York and New Haven the pizzaiolo is more commonly known as the pie man). It's all in the hands.
THE MOZZARELLA
I love the clean, milky taste of fresh cow's-milk mozzarella (fior di latte, in Italian) on my pizza. It's easy to tell if a pizzeria uses fresh mozzarella: It's white. Aged mozzarella, used by the great majority of pizza makers in this country, is that color I call pizza yellow. Because it's aged, it has a certain tanginess. A few pizzerias across the country, including Salvatore's in Port Washington, New York, and Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, Arizona, make their own whole-milk mozzarella fresh every day. Most good by-the-slice pizzerias use a commercial aged mozzarella made by Grande, a large cheese purveyor in Wisconsin. Mozzarella made from the milk of water buffaloes is called mozzarella di bufala. True mozzarella di bufala is produced mostly in Italy, although there is one farm in Vermont that makes it domestically. It's tangy, very creamy (it's actually wet and quite oily when it melts), slightly tart, and unbelievably delicious. It's also quite expensive (even in Italy). In Naples you can get a pizza made with mozzarella di bufala called a DOC for a slight premium. In the States, only a few pizzerias with the Vera Pizzeria Napoletana designation offer it as an option, and only Anthony Mangieri of Una Pizza Napoletana uses it exclusively on his pizza. The only slice I've ever seen made with mozzarella di bufala is baked in Midwood, Brooklyn, at Di Fara Pizza. Unbelievably, Domenico DeMarco uses a blend of fresh mozzarella di bufala and fresh cow's-milk mozzarella on slices that are an absolute steal at $2.50.
OTHER CHEESES
Chris Bianco of Pizzeria Bianco goes to the trouble of smoking his own mozzarella in his wood-burning pizza oven using pecan wood. The result is the best smoked mozzarella I have ever tasted, which he uses on his Wiseguy pie along with roasted onions and sweet fennel-laced sausage. Many first-rate pizzerias use a judicious sprinkling of freshly grated Romano and/or Parmigiano-Reggiano to flavor their pizzas. DeMarco and Lawrence Ciminieri of Totonno's both use freshly grated Romano to lend a little saltiness and tang to their pies. La Pizza Fresca uses a dusting of Parmigiano-Reggiano on its pizza, which lends it a slightly nutty flavor. As Dan Young notes , pizzerias in the south of France use Cantal (a mild Cheddar) and Gruyère on their pizza instead of mozzarella. Chefs like Todd English, Mario Batali, and Alice Waters use goat cheese and Gorgonzola on particular pizzas.
THE SAUCE
The best pizza sauces are made with uncooked canned tomatoes, from either California or Italy, that have been strained and seasoned with salt and maybe some oregano. Pizza sauce should not be slow-cooked. It should not taste like pasta sauce or marinara sauce. Some people think you have to use San Marzano tomatoes, grown in that town in Italy, that have been designated DOP (Denominazione di Origine Protetta). They are very expensive, and I have found wonderful pizza sauces made with other Italian tomatoes or even high-quality California tomatoes. Some people doctor their sauce with sugar, giving it an excessive sweetness that I don't care for. If the tomatoes used are good enough, they will be plenty sweet on their own. Fresh tomatoes are generally not used to make the sauce for pizza, though fresh cherry tomatoes are used to make the pie the Neapolitans call Al Fileto.
THE TOPPINGS
I love the taste of fresh, meaty, fennel sausage on pizza. Unfortunately, many places use what I call sausage pellets or sausage droppings, which are not worth the calories or the fat grams. Chris Bianco makes his own sweet sausage to use as a topping. But even if your local pizzeria doesn't make its own sausage, it can buy it locally from a butcher. I find the best sausage is irregularly shaped and chunked. Small rounds can be okay, as can long oblong pieces of sausage, but avoid the pellets. The best pizzerias also use fresh mushrooms and roast their own peppers. Before you order, ask if the mushrooms are fresh and if the peppers are roasted in house. All pepperonis are not created equal. Hormel's Grande pepperoni has a much cleaner taste than regular pepperoni. Mario Batali makes his own pepperoni at Otto, and it's the best pepperoni pizza I have ever tasted. Clams are a fantastic topping for pizza, as long as they're fresh and used judiciously.
BALANCE
The best pizzas achieve a kind of harmonic and textural balance. It's a balance shared by all great dishes. What contributes to that balance? The right combination of tastes and textures. The puffy, chewy and just salty enough crust should play off the oozy, creamy mozzarella and the acidic sweetness of the tomato sauce. I like all my toppings to be used in moderation. This means I like discrete areas of sauce and cheese on my pizza. I like my mozzarella fresh and my sausage chunked and sweet and fennelly. I like my pizza sauce made with uncooked fresh tomatoes and a little salt.
Ed Levine is a regular contributor to the New York Times Dining section and is author of New York Eats and New York Eats More. He also maintains a blog: Ed Levine Eats. This entry is an excerpt from his book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, published on Slice through special arrangement.
When I was doing "primary research" for the book that this series of Slice of Heaven excerpts comes from, that is, eating pizza in San Francisco, I called my 16-year-old son, Will, from my hotel room after a typical six-pizza day in the Bay Area. We exchanged greetings before Will asked, "So how's the work—quote unquote—going, Dad?" I admit it's easy to be skeptical about the motivation (and sanity) of a grown man who would consider eating nothing but pizza for 12 months. But I love pizza. If my editor had asked me to visit and review all 63,873 pizza purveyors in America, plus another couple of thousand in Italy, I would have happily accepted the challenge. (We decided, in the end, to list only those places that I—and other food critics whose opinion I respect—have found to serve truly great pizza.)
Posted by Adam Kuban, January 31, 2006 at 11:21 AM
Hey, pizzafans—some exciting news here at Slice.
In a special arrangement with food writer Ed Levine, this site is going to be publishing excerpts from his book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. Its subtitle, The Ultimate Guide and Companion, pretty much sums up the contents. It's an exhaustive look at this nation's (and Italy's) best pizzerias, with guides and musings on all things pie.
The first of these posts will go up shortly, followed over the next several days and weeks by others. To read them all as a bundle as they start to accumulate, visit the Slice of Heaven archives.
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Frankie and Mary Lou Cappezza, the former owners of the now-closed Corona Heights Pork Store, are my culinary E. F. Huttons. When they talk, I listen. So when they told me I had to check out Rose & Joe Italian Bakery in their old Astoria stomping grounds, I wasted no time getting there.
, published on Slice through special arrangement.
