Entries tagged with 'The Bronx'
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.
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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 Adam Kuban, November 10, 2007 at 12:00 PM
Slice's Bronx Pizza Map lists all pizzerias we have reviewed and/or mentioned in the Bronx. Clicking the pizza icons will bring up address, phone number, URL (if any), and a link back to all entries Slice has on the particular pizzeria. It's a handy way to visually navigate what Slice has to offer. The map legend is at right.
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Posted by Ed Levine, November 7, 2007 at 2:00 PM
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).
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Posted by Adam Kuban, October 4, 2007 at 6:00 AM
Dear Slice,
It is not the nicest looking of store fronts but has one of the best tastes in NYC and is nice and big. Give it a try.
—Paul V.
King's Pizza
Address: 131 West Kingsbridge Road, Bronx NY 10468 [map]
Phone: 718-549-0050
Thanks, Paul! Anyone else out there got any intel on King's?
Posted by Adam Kuban, August 28, 2007 at 2:30 PM
Homeslice Robert C. writes in with a list of pizzerias in the Bronx's Pelham Bay. I'll let him speak for himself. —The Mgmt.
Dear Slice,
I was recently turned on to your website and really enjoyed it. I see that you did a decent job mentioning some good Bronx places we frequent, like Louie & Ernie’s, Coals, and Tosca. We live in Pelham Bay, and I am happy to report that we still have a ton of great pizza parlors in our neighborhood. I’m almost afraid to mention this, as I don’t want too many tourists to come and the prices to go up. But really isn’t it a crime not to share the news on great pizza?
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Posted by Ed Levine, May 7, 2007 at 4:50 PM
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.
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Posted by Ed Levine, April 24, 2007 at 9:51 AM
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)
This entry is an excerpt from Ed Levine's book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. To read more, visit the Slice of Heaven archives here on Slice or buy the book from Amazon
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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 Ed Levine, February 27, 2007 at 2:00 PM
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."
He's right. So without further ado, Slice will resume posting excerpts from Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. If you've missed any, here's the archive of all Slice of Heaven entries. —The Mgmt.
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, June 14, 2006 at 12:10 AM
Just got back from tonight's Yankees vs. Indians game (Yankees, 1-0). The seats kicked ass; the pizza didn't. It's Famous Famiglia, which you may be familiar with from one of its many locations in New York City or around the country. As one of my companions this evening said, "Eh. It's no better or no worse than Sbarro." You know the score -- I'd recommend sticking to the equally overpriced but more traditional hot dog, peanuts, and beer menu.
Slices are $4.50 (!!!) each for plain or pepperoni and are sized smaller than typical slice-joint portions.
Here's the upskirt:
As you can see, rather blonde crust with the telltale crosshatching revealing it's been cooked on screens. I'm not sure, but I'd bet they're running 'em through impinger ovens to meet the demand. In fact, I think I see one in the background of this photo (click through for larger versions):
Don't do this. You'll get yelled at by stadium staff if you lay anything on top of the dugout.
Here's the pepperoni slice.
The final score:
Posted by Ed Levine, March 9, 2006 at 9:51 PM
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.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, January 16, 2006 at 8:01 PM
Louie & Ernie's
Phone: 718-829-6230
Location: 1300 Crosby Avenue, The Bronx NY 10461 (Pelham Bay; map)
Getting There: 6 train to Buhre Ave.; walk south along Crosby Ave. to 1300. It's a 10- to 15-minute walk
Payment: Cash only
The Skinny: Creamy, somewhat-sparingly applied mozzarella plus plenty of piquant Parmigiano and an ever-so-salty crust make this one of the best non–coal oven/nonartisanal pies I've had. Readily accessible only to those who live nearby in the Bronx's Pelham Bay neighborhood—and even those lucky stiffs have to make the trek there because Louie & Ernie's doesn't do delivery.
I was beginning to doubt my own sense of pizza judgment until I met a number of slices at Louie & Ernie's last Saturday night. It's easy to judge the merits of one coal-oven place to the next or among the pies of the growing legion of Neapolitan-style places popping up in the city. But when it comes to a good, honest down-home slice joint, things get dicey. They all seem to pile on the cheese, use the same boring sauce, and prepare their crust according to some tired, doughy formula they copied out of Passionless Pizza Recipes
Louie & Ernie's manages to avoid these faults, all the while restoring my faith that I can actually tell a good regular slice when I come across it. Louie & Ernie's also gives me hope that there are more places like it in New York City—preferably ones closer to my home and office.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, January 3, 2006 at 10:00 AM
Friends of Slice Listmaker and Youthlarge were car-sitting last week. Listmaker wanted to make the most of their automotive-having days, so he suggested a pizza excursion at some point during the holidays.
Wanting to make the most of car access myself, I suggested Tosca Café in the Throgs Neck section of The Bronx, a spot that would normally be a bit difficult to reach via public transport (right).
Listmaker, Youthlarge, and I set off around 7 p.m. on Friday, picked up their friend Dave, and we all made it to Tosca by 8 p.m. or so—after a few wrong turns.
Tosca Café's got a coal oven, and that's a big deal. Coal-burners are a sort of holy grail in this town, as some of the best and oldest pizzerias use them to produce amazing pizzas. Such ovens are capable of reaching the insanely hot temperatures needed to make a pie crisp and give it oven spring while still yielding a satisfying chewiness and pliability in the crust. This trip was a big deal for me, too, because Tosca's long been on the Slice "places to try" list.
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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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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:
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