Real Italian Pizza, pt. 3

fig. a: videoblogging in action

Isabella's Oven

We paused outside of Isabella's to squeeze in a little video food-blogging, but after our disappointing experience at Adrienne's we were eager to get our mojo back, so we marched in the door to find Isabella's empty, its entire staff taking a break. It was mid-afternoon at that point, so although it did make for a stark juxtaposition with Adrienne's, that fact alone wasn't exactly cause for panic. What was cause for panic, however, was that Ed and Adam instantly noticed that "their pieman"--Luigi, the fantastically talented, Naples-trained pizzaiolo who'd made each of the exceptional pies they'd enjoyed at Isabella's since Ed first got tipped off to Isabella's last summer--wasn't in the house. Ed and Adam had heard from other pizza enthusiasts that they'd had less than exemplary pizza experiences at Isabella's, that, in fact, the pizza at Isabella's wasn't "all that," but every time the Serious Eats boys had visited Luigi had been there to greet them with an expert Neapolitan pie. This time, however, they found real cause for concern. Maybe there was some kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing going on at Isabella's, depending on whether Luigi was around. Ed tried to get the skinny on Luigi's whereabouts and was informed that he'd had to return to Italy on personal business and that he'd be back there for an indefinite amount of time. In his absence the daytime pieman had become Isabella's principal pieman. It was clear that this was bad news.

We ordered a Margherita D.O.C. pizza (with D.O.C. bufala mozzarella) and tried to keep things upbeat, but Ed and Adam were clearly worried that they might have to relegate Isabella's to a lower division. And that's exactly what happened. The 16" pie that arrived was perfectly fine, respectable even, but far from transcendent, far from being the pie that had Ed had deemed potential national-top-ten material back in July. I mean, you can tell by just looking at it. See that crust?

fig. b: Margherita D.O.C. from Isabella's Oven

Now compare that with the crusts we got at Di Fara and Franny's. And compare it with the crusts you're going to see below.

Remember that "myth of the pizzaiolo" jazz I went on about in "Real Italian Pizza, pt. 2"? Well, here was an abject lesson in how a single, solitary pizzaiolo can make all the difference in the high-stakes pizza game that is New York City pizza.

So after starting off with a bang, we were on a bit of a losing streak. First, an undercooked grandma pie at Nick Angelis's Adrienne's Pizzabar, and now this? We needed a little help, and that's exactly what we got.

Verdict: pinch-hit single.

fig. c: Una Pizza Napoletana

Una Pizza Napoletana

Minutes later, we'd relocated from the Lower East Side to the East Village, and we were standing in front of a place we'd heard a lot about over the course of the day and a place that Ed devotes a considerable amount of ink to in the pages of Pizza: A Slice of Heaven: Una Pizza Napoletana. Just three years old, the aura that surrounds Una Pizza Napoletana is already enormous.

The story goes something like this: a few years ago, Ed was contacted by a friend of his in New Jersey who proceeded to tell him she'd just recently eaten the single best thing she'd ever eaten in New Jersey (which, considering she was the long-time food critic at the Asbury Park Press, was saying something)--and that thing wasn't some high-falutin' dish from some high-falutin' restaurant, it was pizza from a little strip mall pizzeria in Point Pleasant, on the North Jersey Shore. Ed hustled his way down to Point Pleasant and there he encountered the talent of Anthony Mangieri for the first time. Mangieri had started off as a bread baker and he'd taken that very seriously too--opening his first bakery before he was 21. A few years later he switched over to pizza exclusively. He'd grown up in a family with strong ties to Naples, so he'd visited often, eaten a lot of pizza, taken a lot of mental notes. Pizza became Mangieri's thing, his raison d'être. Ed could see he had that gleam in his eye--the one that distinguishes the merely professional from the certifiably obsessed. Better yet, he could taste it in Mangieri's pies.

Not long after Ed's momentous visit, Mangieri moved the operation to the East Village, barely changing a thing. He's only open four days a week, and on those days he's only open until the dough lasts. He still offers only four pizze--Marinara, Margherita, Bianca, Filetti--and these are essentially the only items on the menu. No salads, no appetizers, and no desserts, with the exception of the Italian chocolates that come with the bill. He uses only the purest of ingredients, including mozzarella di bufala (the only cheese Mangieri uses), Sicilian salt, Italian extra-virgin olive oil, and D.O.P. San Marzano tomatoes, and his dough is a homemade sourdough that takes a minimum of 36 hours to produce. Mangieri started off with a locally made wood-fired brick oven, but this summer he upgraded to a handsome white Neapolitan model, and, it's safe to say, he knows how to use it. Neither Michelle or I had ever seen anyone tend an oven like Mangieri does. It was mesmerizing.

We showed up at Una Pizza Napoletana just before opening time that Saturday. We were a little early and we were just about to take a walk around the block to kill some time and check out the latest restaurant in the Momofuku family when we ran into Mangieri outside. Perfect timing. We got a chance to talk to him about pizza, about Italian food more generally, about Montreal (and about the shortcomings of Montreal pizza), and we got a chance to see that gleam too. A few minutes later he invited us in to grab a seat. The oven was ready, therefore he was ready.

While Mangieri was preparing our pizzas, Ed asked him a hypothetical question. Let's say you go into a reputable pizza place, you order your pizza, and then they bring it out to you. It looks great from the outside--nicely colored, apparently well cooked--but then you bite in and it's all gummy and undercooked. What gives? Is that a dough problem? Is it an oven problem? Mangieri walked us through the possible scenarios, but the probable cause was an overly hot oven. Then he explained the trials and tribulations of a wood-burning pizza oven: its intense heat, its temperamentality, and the fact that your optimum cooking time might only last an hour or so, which means that the rest of the evening you might be dealing with an oven that's just too damn hot, quickly scorching the dough on the outside, while leaving the interior insufficiently cooked. This means that every night the pizzaiolo working a wood-burning oven struggles to make the adjustments necessary to guarantee the best possible pizza given the conditions of the moment, that the best pizzaiolo is the one who's most capable when it comes to making these countless adjustments. This gave a further wrinkle to the "myth of the pizzaiolo."

The first of our pizzas to arrive from Mangieri's oven was our Marinara--"San Marzano tomatoes, extra-virgin olive oil, oregano, fresh garlic, fresh basil, sea salt," according to Una Pizza Napoletana's menu--a pizza that Ed described as being "a minimalist masterpiece" after his first encounter. I wanted to know how Mangieri worked a cheeseless pie, so I'd lobbied for a Marinara, and I was glad I had. I mean, just look at that thing.

fig. d: Una Pizza Napoletana's marinara

Simple perfection incarnate. Mangieri's sourdough crust was enough to make you cry. So much flavor, so masterfully handled.

It's hard to believe, I know, but the next pie, the Filetti, was even better. Topped with cherry tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, fresh garlic, extra-virgin olive oil, fresh basil, and that Sicilian sea salt, this pizza was deluxe. We'd been having buffalo mozzarella all day--at Di Fara, at Franny's, at Isabella's, and now at Una Pizza Napoletana--but this was by far and away the tastiest, most satisfying buffalo mozzarella we'd encountered. And its marriage with the garlic, the cherry tomatoes, the salt, the basil, and that sourdough crust was astounding. Looked great too:

fig. e: Una Pizza Napoletana's filetti

On some level, eating at Una Pizza Napoletana is an austere experience. As mentioned above, there are no salads or other kinds of appetizers. There are only four pizzas on the menu to choose from and subsitutions or any other special requests are not allowed. There are no desserts, aside from those chocolates mentioned above, although they do offer Neapolitan-style espressos--very good ones, in fact. The restaurant is small and simply appointed. The menu reads part history lesson, part manifesto, part throwdown. The overall aesthetic is nothing if not spartan. That said, Mangieri is capable of taking the most basic and ingredients and transforming them into a pizza so extraordinary that one bite makes you feel like you're sitting on top of the world. His pizzas don't come cheap--"We have no quarrel with the man who sells cheaper pizza", the menu exclaims, "he knows how much his is worth!"--but, at the same time, pizza's inherently democratic appeal is still very much intact. "Nothing... purer or [more] honestly wholesome can be bought at any price," Mangieri's menu reads, and he means it.

Pizza fanatics talk about the five-minute rule or the third-slice rule: the first slice or two, fresh out of the oven, can be a little misleading. The third slice, when the pizza has had some time to cool down a bit, is the true test of a pizza. The problem with Mangieri's pizzas was that they were so good, they didn't last that long, The four of us had been at it for 6-7 hours already, but we tore into those pies as though they were our first.

Verdict: grand slam.

How do you continue after you've been to the mountain? Not wanting to risk another difficult comedown, we decided to call it a Pizza Tour after Una Pizza Napoletana. That would mean leaving Joe's and Bleecker Street Pizza for another occasion. But there was something almost operatic about it. A 5-act, seven-and-a-half-hour opera, with some true highs and lows, some tears, some triumphs, a couple of Italian heroes, and a few important lessons. We thanked our hosts profusely

fig. f: the Serious Eats boys

and headed back to Brooklyn to try to make sense of it all. Days later, back in Montreal, we were still reeling.

Didn't catch Parts One and Two?  Well, here they are.

411:

Di Fara, 1424 Avenue J, Brooklyn, NY, (718) 258-1367

Franny's, 295 Flatbush Ave., Brooklyn, NY, (718) 230-0221, www.frannysbrooklyn.com

Adrienne's Pizzabar, 54 Stone St., New York, NY, (212) 248-3838, www.adriennespizzabar.com

Isabella's Oven, 365 Grand St., New York, NY, (212) 529-5206, www.isabellasoven.com

Una Pizza Napoletana, 349 E. 12th St., New York, NY, (212) 477-9950, www.unapizza.com

Don't ask us to provide you with directions so that you can replicate this pizza tour exactly. Adam made sure to throw in plenty of dekes and diversions so that this pizza tour would remain absolutely one-of-a-kind. You will find plenty of handy-dandy interactive pizza maps at slice, though. You'll also find Adam's own personal play-by-play account of NY Pizza Tour 2007.

Sources:

Ed Levine, Pizza: A Slice of Heaven

John Thorne, "Existential Pizza," Pot on the Fire: Further Exploits of a Renegade Cook

Alan Davidson, The Penguin Companion to Food

Ed Behr, "Pizza in Naples," The Art of Eating (spring 1992)

aj

ps--apologies to any and all members of our New York posse (you know who you are) that we weren't able to see during our whirlwind visit.

Real Italian Pizza, pt. 2

fig. a: naked city

On the morning of New York Pizza Tour 2007, I woke up with some serious butterflies. I'd gone from being a lifelong pizza lover to being a minor-league pizza fanatic (the kind of person who might drive several hours in search of great pizza, or, apparently, the kind of person who might drive several hours to a famous pizza Mecca in order to then spend several hours wolfing down as many slices of premium pizza as he can get his hands on, as opposed to the kind of person who settles for the local delivery outfit), but in spite of my numerous visits to the Big Apple over the years, I'd yet to really face up to New York pizza. Sure, I'd had a fine coal-oven pizza from John's some 15 years ago that had been a real revelation, and in recent years I'd had a couple of other critically acclaimed New York pies and some decent slices, but I knew full well that my New York pizza education was spotty and that I'd barely scratched the surface. I limited myself to just a cup of coffee in anticipation of the pizza marathon ahead. Michelle, on the other hand, was remarkably calm and collected, and, ever the daredevil, she actually went ahead and had a few doughnuts with her coffee in spite of the awe-inspiring schedule ahead of us. By 11:00 a.m., though, we were both outside anxiously waiting for the Pizza Express to pull up and whisk us away on our adventure.

Di Fara

Adam arrived in the Pizza Express at around 11:15 and we promptly got on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and raced towards Midwood. Midwood is the Brooklyn neighborhood that's home to Di Fara and we had to hurry because Di Fara's renown is such that if you don't get in there nice and early you could very well end up with a 2-3 hour wait for your pizza. We had six pizza joints and seven hours of pizza eating ahead of us, so the last thing Adam wanted to do was to get caught in a snag on the first leg of the tour.

fig. b: Di Fara: Italian Heroes

We got to Di Fara not long after opening time and things were still just getting underway. Domenico DeMarco, Di Fara's legendary owner/pizzaiolo, was already very much in the thick of things, but the throngs had yet to show up. About a minute or two after we arrived, Dom pulled a pan full of Sicilian "square" slices out of the oven and we got our first glimpse of that DeMarco magic: he started scissoring fresh basil leaves overtop. According to Adam, these square slices usually get snapped right up, but for some reason the punters weren't buying on this particular morning. So Adam jumped in, asked for two, and deftly managed to slip in our other pizza order too: half regular, half artichoke. It was almost too easy--within two minutes we'd had a chance to look around (it doesn't get much more old-school than this), take in the scene (eager die-hards, with just a few other first-timers), get in our order (yes!), and we were already enjoying our very first taste of a Di Fara slice.

fig. c: Di Fara's Sicilian slice

The Di Fara Sicilian slice is a rustic, rectangular, semi-thick-crusted number--it lacks the finesse of Di Fara's regular thin-crust pies, but it's an honest and friendly pizza slice with plenty of sauce, Di Fara's trademark trio of cheeses, and a crisp crust, and it made for a perfect hors d'oeuvre while we awaited the main event. It also got rid of any and all remaining butterflies. From that point on I was good to go.

fig. d: Dom's office

And wait we did. Not long, mind you, because we'd gotten our order in quickly and the crowd was still relatively small, but Di Fara is no grindhouse. Dom doesn't let anyone else touch his pizzas, and he's nothing if not attentive to every single pizza he makes, taking the utmost care with his dough, hand-grating his trademark three-cheese blend (bufala mozzarella, regular mozzarella, and Grana Padano), scissoring basil leaves over the pizza after it comes out of the oven, and giving each pizza a graceful spritz of olive oil as a parting gesture. Keep in mind: Di Fara is primarily a slice joint.

fig. e: Dom's magic

fig. f: the DeMarco boys in action

A few years ago Dom explained his unorthodox approach to pizza-making to Jeff Van Dam of the New York Times: "Pizza has become considered a fast food. This one is slow food. Anything you do, when you do it too fast it's no good. The way I make pizza takes a lot of work." Personally, we wouldn't want it any other way, because, frankly, all that work works. You can taste the care and the attention.

fig. g: portrait of the artist as a young man

fig. h: Di Fara's regular/artichoke pie

Both sides of our pizza lived up to our humongous expectations, but it was the artichoke half that we found particularly breathtaking. Dom being Dom, fresh artichokes--not canned--are trimmed down to their hearts and gently sauteed in olive oil before they're added to his artichoke pies. We'd heard that the artichoke hearts sometimes got a bit charred, and consequently a bit bitter, when in the oven, but our first experience of the Di Fara artichoke pie was flawless, each bite literally melting in your mouth.

This was just our first stop and already we were walking on air. We boxed up the last two remaining slices and moved on, eager for Round 2.

Verdict: home run.

fig. i: Franny's

Franny's

After another short drive across Brooklyn, we arrived at Franny's to find Ed Levine waiting for us. He'd kindly given Adam, Michelle, and I a chance to get primed and up to speed, and now he was ready to take charge. You'll notice in what follows that the number of photos drops off precipitously. Part of this has to do with the fact that you'd be hard-pressed to find a restaurant of any stripe that's as photogenic as Di Fara. It's got personality to spare. Part of it has to do with Dom's particular form of perfectionism, which gave us plenty of time to snap away--though we hit some pretty serious pizza parlors after Di Fara, not one of them exercised an approach to pizza-making that was as, well, deliberate as Dom's. But a good part of this drop-off in photographic documentation had to do with Ed. Adam had alerted us to Ed's gift of the gab as we made our to Franny's, and Ed did not disappoint in the least. What ensued alongside our 8-hour pizza-eating marathon was an 8-hour food-talk marathon led by Ed, and, to be honest, we couldn't have been happier. We liked these pizza guys--they were our kind of people.

Anyway, Ed was more than ready, so he jumped right in and started ordering. Two pies, naturally, one bufala mozzarella number and one clam pie--the best one this side of New Haven, apparently. Neither of us have had the pleasure of sampling one of those legendary Pepe's clam pies, but I did have a clam pie at Mario Batali's Otto a couple of years back and it was something of a disaster. The pizza crust was good--thankfully, by that time Batali had cleared up the initial problems he'd had with his griddle pies, as documented in Bill Buford's Heat and by Batali himself in Pizza: A Slice of Heaven--and the clams themselves were delicious, but they'd been piled on top of the crust in their shells (?). Imagine what the clam shells and their cooking liquid did to the crust. Imagine trying to eat such a thing. Ed agreed that Otto's clam pie was something of a conceptual debacle, but he assured me that Franny's version had no such weaknesses.

fig. j: pizza, Franny's-style

Our Franny's pizzas arrived and they looked impeccable, which is a funny thing to say about real Italian pizza or pizza with real Italian aspirations because a lot of what sets Naples-style pizzas apart are all those bits of character that novices might mistake for flaws--charring being at the top of the list. As Dom puts it, "fresh dough bubbles when you put it in the oven, and the bubbles get a little burnt. You see the pizza, and it's got a lot of black spots, it's Italian pizza. If you see pizza that's straight brown, it's not Italian pizza." A true pizzaiolo knows that charring is the price you have to pay for a pizza that's cooked properly, that's allowed its dough to reach fruition--a true pizzaiolo also knows that it's those blisters than bring out a pizza's complexities, its full potential. These were two pizzas that had definitely reached their full potential. Franny's crust was unbelievably light and wonderfully chewy, with just enough crispness, and that bufala mozzarella pie went down easy.

The real showstopper, though, was the clam pie. Dressed with Italian parsley, just a little bit spicy, rich in clam flavor, and beautifully saffron-hued, this was the clam pizza of our dreams. Turns out the pizza's alluring color comes from the fact that the clams were gently steamed in wine and then reduced, with a touch of cream added to the mix to really push them over the top. Like I said: the clam pizza of our dreams.

fig. k: Franny's kitchen

In many ways Franny's is a real anomaly. Andrew Feinberg, the head chef/co-owner, had never made pizza professionally before he opened Franny's with his wife, Francine Stephens. He was a professional chef with an impressive resumé, but he didn't have any of the usual New York pizza-making credentials (i.e. family ties to Gennaro Lombardi) and he apparently devised his pizza dough recipe very much on his own. Then he and Francine did something really orthodox: they opened Franny's as an environmentally responsible restaurant. In terms of approach to pizza-making, though, what interested me was that of the three standout pizzerias that we visited as part of our New York pizza tour, this was the only place that was also a full-service restaurant, including a bar, a large seating area, a full wait staff, a reasonably sized kitchen, and a full kitchen staff, including a team of pizza-makers. Top pizza establishments in the Neapolitan tradition live and die by the pizzaiolo. Those that have the best quality-control have as few as possible, and the best often only have one, so what we might call "the myth of the pizzaiolo" or "the pizzaiolo as hero" is crucial to your hardcore Naples-style pizzerias. I'm sure Franny's has a very select team of pizza-makers, but they're still open six days a week, including lunch and dinner on weekends, and their production volume is much higher than our other two standouts (especially during the warm-weather months, when they have a lovely patio out back). But by introducing the exacting standards of an exceedingly well-run top-notch kitchen, not only have they managed to offer an extensive menu that includes an outstanding selection of house-cured meats, they're also able to deliver on the promise of their big, beautiful brick oven.

Franny's was the one pizzeria listed on our itinerary that I'd had the pleasure of visiting previously. I'd visited one summer evening a year or so ago with a couple of hardened skeptics who were dead set on writing Franny's off. Four pizzas later, though, including an utterly daring, practically naked extra-virgin oil and sea salt pie, Franny's had left us terribly impressed (well, it left me terribly impressed and my companions quieted). This time around, I might have even left more impressed. The pizzas were extraordinary--especially that clam pie--but this time I also got a fuller sense of Franny's repertoire, including the distinct pleasure of sampling their house-cured soppressata, pancetta and bresaola plate as the warm-up act, and their phenomenal homemade fior di latte ice cream as the closer.

Verdict: home run.

Adrienne's

After two utterly transcendental pizza experiences, Adrienne's Pizzabar was considerably more down-to-earth--a little too down-to-earth. We'd gone there--to lowest Lower Manhattan, adjacent to Wall Street, of all places--in order to try a well-regarded Manhattan take on that Long Island pizza micro-genre known simply as "grandma pizza," and thereby further expand our New York pizza vocabulary. What exactly is grandma pizza, you ask? Well, it's more or less a rectangular Sicilian pie that's been made with an exceedingly thin crust, just like Nonna used to make. It's a Long Island-based phenomenon whose history as an established style dates back only about 20 years, but since then grandma pizza has popped up in all kinds of unlikely locations: Brooklyn, Pompano Beach, Las Vegas--even Lower Manhattan. Needless to say, we were very intrigued.

Our "old-fashioned" (as Adrienne's calls their grandma pies) looked pretty spectacular when it arrived at the table, but one bite and we discovered that its glorious appearance was hiding a nasty secret: it wasn't cooked through.

fig. l: pizza horror show

This was a major violation of one of pizza's most hallowed cardinal rules: you gotta let the pie to cook through. Ed was visibly upset. He'd already been a little taken aback by the crowd packing Adrienne's at 2:00 on a Saturday afternoon, which he took to be a sign of Lowest Manhattan's exploding population (the fastest-growing on the island of Manhattan, apparently) and not necessarily of Adrienne's astounding popularity, or the triumph of grandma pie, for that matter. But an uncooked pizza? That was too much for him. Not wanting to see a grown man cry, we quickly paid our bill and fled to the Lower East Side, hoping to get our momentum back.

Verdict: foul out.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Happened to miss Part One?  Well, here it is.

aj

Real Italian Pizza, pt. 1

fig. a: real Italian pizza in the making, New York-style

Those of you long-time "...an endless banquet" readers with exceptionally good memories may remember that earlier this year we were the recipients of a peculiar prize as a result of our participation in Menu for Hope III. Yep, that's right: we're a litttle embarassed to say it, but somehow we walked away with a pizza tour of New York contributed by Serious Eats and hosted by two of New York's most accomplished pizza cognoscenti: Ed Levine (Serious Eats, Ed Levine's New York Eats, The New York Times and various other publications, and, Pizza: A Slice of Heaven) and Adam Kuban (Serious Eats, A Hamburger Today, and Slice, "America's Favorite Pizza Weblog!"). When we received the Good News we were absolutely ecstatic. We probably couldn't have designed a better prize ourselves. Here at AEB, any excuse to go to New York is a good excuse, but a curated tour of the city's best pizza haunts has gotta be among the best excuses imaginable.

That said, it took us a while to coordinate things--almost a year, in fact. Eleven excruciating months. But we didn't panic--not once--we just used the time to bone up on pizza and its lore (Slice, Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, Ed Behr, John and Matt Thorne, David Rimmer's Real Italian Pizza, etc.). A few weeks ago, though, when the Canadian dollar suddenly surged to $1.10 US, we took that as some kind of sure-fire sign from above that it was finally time to take the plunge. We got back in touch with Adam and made all the necessary arrangements.

What exactly does a pizza tour of New York entail? Well, aside from some gargantuan appetites, a motor vehicle, and a photographic apparatus or two to document the proceedings for posterity, it takes some good maps and some New York street know-how. The proposed itinerary for this particular tour had us traversing two boroughs--Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan--and hitting seven pizza joints over the course of about eight hours. The split consisted of two Brooklyn pizzerias and five in Manhattan, it also consisted of three seasoned classics and four brash, young upstarts. It came complete with "intel" (see links below) and it looked something like this:

"11:30 a.m.: Di Fara (the legend)

12:45 p.m.: Franny's (killer wood-oven pizza)

2 p.m.: Adrienne's Pizzabar (grandma pizza)

3 p.m.: Isabella's Oven (great New York-Neapolitan pizza)

4 p.m.: Una Pizza Napoletana (the now-legendary hardcore Naples-style place)

5:30 p.m.: Joe's Pizza (classic NY slice)

6 p.m.: Bleecker Street Pizza (great grandma slice)
[No Slice intel online :( ]"

We literally gasped when we read it. Then we did a little dance. And a couple of days later, after we'd recovered, we were on the New York State Thruway, heading south towards our date with destiny.

TO BE CONTINUED...

aj