|
|
Maura A. Smale | November 10th, 2010
Ah, Totonno’s. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that last week was my first time eating at one of my home borough’s most famous pizza places. And it was fitting penance, too, for my major goof earlier this fall: on a trip to the aquarium with my kid, it was only when we sat down and I watched him begin to eat the limp, cafeteria-style pizza while I reluctantly tucked into a sad chicken salad that I realized with a doh! how close we were to Totonno’s AT THAT VERY MOMENT.
I made up for it last week. It was a dark & stormy night (though no tornadoes, like the trip to Di Fara’s I missed in September). But the pizza completely made up for the long, cold commute down to the edge of Brooklyn. By the numbers there were 6 people, 5 pies, 2 glasses of wine, and not sure how many Brooklyn Lagers.
And it was good. Thin crust, just the right combination of chewy and crispy. Excellent sauce to cheese ratio. We went for one each of the plain, pepperoni, white, anchovy, and sausage pies. I have to admit that I hit my limit before the last pizza arrived, and there were a couple of sausage slice leftovers, speedily divvied up in a rock-paper-scissors smackdown.
My favorites were the white pie, with its vampire-busting levels of garlic, and the anchovy pie, solely consumed by Boone, my spouse Jonathan, and me. What’s up with the fish-hating, CUNY Pie-ites? Where’s the anchovy love? Boone’s eyes were as big as saucers when he realized there were others there to help consume one round of salty tasty fishy goodness. Clearly I need to make future CUNY Pie outings more of a priority, lest Boone slowly perish from lack of anchovies.
Matthew K. Gold | November 3rd, 2010
Reposted from the CUNY Pie group so that non-CUNY members can comment and join us:
cc licensed photo by Adam Kuban
Hi All,
This is a biggie. Tomorrow evening, CUNY Pie will make the trek out to the farthest reaches of Brooklyn to sample what many people believe is the best pizza to be found in the New York region (and, therefore, the world (no “arguably” about it) ).
Here are the kinds of things people tend to say about Totonno’s:
“Only God Makes Better Pizza” — Zagat review
“Legendary” — The New York Times
“My favorite pizzeria” — Boone B. Gorges
“Every self-respecting pizza-loving New Yorker should visit the Coney Island original at least once in his lifetime. Go soon before they run out of dough permanently.” — New York Magazine
So, yes, my friends, you need to join us, as this is sure to be an epic CUNY Pie.
Depending on how many people are coming and where they are coming from, we will set up a meeting place so that we can all head over together. If we have a large Manhattan contingent, we can meet there as we have in the past, but I think it might make sense to meet in Brooklyn — perhaps somewhere along the F line. And if you’d prefer to meet us at the restaurant, we will be meeting up at Totonno’s at our usual time — 6pm.
If you plan on coming, please respond to this post and let us know where you are coming from.
Hope to see you tomorrow.
In solidarity,
Matt
Boone Gorges | August 19th, 2010
I felt grouchy the day we went to Co., Jim Sullivan’s renowned pizza restaurant on the West Side of Manhattan. In retrospect, I suppose that I was predisposed to be skeptical about Co. I’d heard raves about the Popeye (spinach and gruyère) and the meatball pies, about the oven and the crusts that were coming out of it. Accolades had reached me through Twitter, where friends had loved the place, and through the traditional media, where Frank Bruni had bestowed a coveted star. These kinds of expectations, coupled with a look at the menu – single-serving pies average $15-ish – had put me on alert long before arriving at 9th and 24th.
We were a big group, so we ordered at least one of every pizza on the menu. I would call several of the pies “good”. The Margherita was nice enough, the Popeye was indeed tasty, the sausage on the Boscaiola was pretty top-notch. The Rosa, more like pa amb tomàquet than pizza, was the best thing I ate at Co. that day. All the other pizzas were pleasant enough. For being heralded as a pizza-crust-lover’s paradise, I found the pies inconsistent in their doneness; a few had a char that bordered on burn, while others were paler than I would have liked. All of the crusts were puffier, breadier than I’d anticipated, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing when considered as bread, but always strikes me as odd in pizza.
And really, this strikes at the heart of my feelings as I ate at Co. Set aside the fact that the meal itself was overpriced and overhyped. Considered qua meal, my lunch at Co. was actually pretty enjoyable. But as someone expecting pizza, the experience left me feeling sad.
While it certainly isn’t the worst offender out there, Co. symbolized for me a kind of emotional trick. When you open a restaurant and decide to advertise it as a pizza place (or when you have a very New Yorker “Pies” section on the menu), you bring the entire history and culture of pizza to bear on the dining experience. The diner’s expectations are framed by the pizza terminology, which evokes a family of pizza-related thoughts: red-checkered tablecloths, frozen pizzas, red pepper shakers, Pizza Hut. The baggage of “pizza” is especially impossible to avoid in New York City, where American pizza was born. Like no one else, New Yorkers are deeply connected to their corner slice joints and their favorite holes-in-the-wall. The connotations of “pizza” are surely different for everyone, but there are a few common refrains through those connotations: a certain humility that springs from pizza’s origins as a cheap food for and by immigrants, and is carried on in the $1.75 ($2.00? $2.50?) slices that are the mainstay of many a grad student’s diet.
If “pizza” evokes the quotidian, then to open a pizza restaurant that is highly unquotidian is to make a statement. Such statements can be a beautiful thing; to reject them altogether is mindlessly conservative. Pizza trends can relate to each other like big band jazz to the blues, like bebop to big bands. But if you’re going to evoke the lineage of pizza in order to flout it, let it be a meaningful artistic statement. Flatbread with béchamel and lardons is not the the same thing as *pizza* with béchamel and lardons. $16 flatbread is not the same thing as $16 *pizza*. As you multiply the vectors of contrast against the history of pizza, it gets harder and harder to justify the name; without a thoughtful reason for evoking the emotions attached to pizza, you risk exploiting them.
I feel a bit exploited whenever I visit a place that flouts my culinary expectations in an apparently thoughtless way. I do wonder, though, whether my reaction is a function of the fact that I think too much about pizza. For those of you who are fans of Co. and its ilk: what do you like about it? How do you place it against your pizza heritage?
Matthew K. Gold | August 11th, 2010
 - Photo by Roboppy
I recently met with fellow CUNY Pie co-founder Boone Gorges to discuss some Commons-related issues, and, as usual, the subject of pizza came up. We agreed that the group has had a good first year, but we thought about instituting some changes that would up the ante a bit next year.
In order to add a bit of regularity to our meetings so that members could plan ahead, we’d like to set up a regular meeting schedule. And we thought that it might be good to embrace a semester-long theme. We left my first suggestion — that Fall 2010 be devoted to the borough of Queens, in part because we didn’t make it there in year one — for a later date and decided instead to go old school for the fall, visiting long-established institutions as a grounding point. This continues the work we began last year, when we visited a few of the legendary New York pizzerias (Lombardi’s, Patsy’s, Totonno’s). It seemed only right to finish the job.
Finally, we’re asking that one attendee of each event, to be determined at the table, write up a quick (emphasis on quick) recap for the CUNY Pie blog. Posts should include photos and should be published within two or three days of the visit. We need to make sure that we document our work and that we do so in a timely fashion.
So, here is our proposed schedule for the Fall. We will meet on the first Thursday of every month at 6pm, unless otherwise noted.
CUNY PIE FALL 2010 AGENDA
August 19th: Grimaldi’s (time is of the essence)
September 2 16: DiFara’s
October 714: L&B Spumoni Gardens
November 4: Totonno’s (Coney Island)
December 2: John’s Pizza (Bleeker)
Notice that the November 4th location is TBA; we’d like your help in figuring that one out. Please nominate an old-school NYC pizza joint in the comments. And if you have suggestions for future themes, please let us know.
Here’s to more good eating in the next academic year!
Matthew K. Gold | August 11th, 2010
Now that we’ve completed our first year of CUNY Pie, I thought I’d put together a bit of a retrospective of the year that was in CUNY pizza. Here we go:
LOMBARDI’S
 Plain pie at Lombardi's. Photo by Matt Gold “Beyond sharing our individual histories with pizza, we talked about parenthood, family, and future locations for our meetups. Tontonno’s in Coney Island? Yes. A spot to be named in Jersey? Perhaps. Neopolitan in New Haven? Not me. (Let the Yalies eat it, I say). Mostly, though, we talked about CUNY, the edtech universe, and our various projects. We criticized, confessed, and we praised. We stayed long after I finished that last slice (which happened to be the smallest of the plain pie… thanks, guys!), and the thought of ordering another pie to scarf down before departing probably crossed each of our minds. Perhaps we should have.”
– Luke Waltzer, “Two Larges at Lombardi’s
CORNICIONE
 Anselmo char A Platonist at heart, Boone Gorges ruminated upon the ideal crust and proclaimed it to be deeply charred.
“I am not a particularly sentimental man, but something about a chewy, crispy, charred crust brings the romance out of me. Indulge me: What could be more beautiful than the relationship between a hungry mouth and a hyperglutenous ring of dough? Like all great romances, this one is not without its tensions. Any decent cornicione puts up too much of a fight to simply be bitten off. You have to clench, you have to tear. The best ovens impart the flavor of their many years into those Maillard marks, bits of black that can taste bitter at first. Children might prefer an undercooked doughiness to a deep char, in the same way that they can’t appreciate the many layers of a great love story. Yet, for the initiated, the tensions of the fight make the end result that much more satisfying.”
– Boone Gorges, “Tragedy of the Cornicione”
SAM’S and LUZZO’S
To celebrate WordCampNYC, we held CUNY Pie events on consecutive nights, visiting Sam’s in Brooklyn one night and Luzzo’s in Manhattan the next. I used footage from these outings to create the CUNY Pie Anthem
TOPPINGS
 Photo by Adam Kuban Boone Gorges considered the role of toppings on pizza and declared that he would like to live in a house built out of Totonno’s pepperoni.
TOTONNO’S
 Totonno's pepperoni Boone Gorges visited Totonno’s on the eve of its reopening after a fire. And it was good
Jody Rosen urged us to try Giovannas.
A few members of the CUNY Pie crew sampled pizza in Fairfax, Virginia.
LUCALI
“The CUNY Pie team arrived at Lucali in mid-April, just after dusk, with a cool breeze in the air and an eight-month old baby (!) in tow. We stood outside, shivering a little as we waited for a table. And then, the fateful call came, and we were invited in to a rustic, candlelit dining room with rough-edged, wooden slab tables and the cherried glow of a pizza oven warming the the room. We ordered a few pies and also a calzone, which @boonebgorges let us know was a speciality of the house. The pizzas arrived piping hot, with steam lifting off of the cheese and the light, hand-shaped crust charred to perfection. The tomato sauce was bright and the pies were adorned with fresh basil and long, thin shavings of aged parmigiano reggiano.”
- Matthew Gold, A Post as Aged as the Parmigiano Reggiano
CURRENTLY UNDOCUMENTED (posts coming soon, we hope)
A trip to Patsy’s in East Harlem
A trip to Totonno’s in Coney Island
A trip to Co. in Manhattan
All in all, it was a very good first year, though we have miles to go — and many pizzas to eat — before we sleep. More about that in the next post.
Matthew K. Gold | June 18th, 2010
A few months ago, a small group of CUNY Pie devotees ventured forth from various corners of the tri-state area (New Jersey, Manhattan, Brooklyn) to visit Lucali. It was a trip I had anticipated for a long time, not only because the reviews of Lucali were good from the start, but also because I had tried, without success, to visit twice before: on my first attempt, I arrived to find a full restaurant with a one-hour wait; on my second visit, the place was closed.
Thankfully, we got in this time. The CUNY Pie team arrived at Lucali in mid-April, just after dusk, with a cool breeze in the air and an eight-month old baby (!) in tow. We stood outside, shivering a little as we waited for a table. And then, the fateful call came, and we were invited in to a rustic, candlelit dining room with rough-edged, wooden slab tables and the cherried glow of a pizza oven warming the the room. We ordered a few pies and also a calzone, which @boonebgorges let us know was a speciality of the house. The pizzas arrived piping hot, with steam lifting off of the cheese and the light, hand-shaped crust charred to perfection. The tomato sauce was bright and the pies were adorned with fresh basil and long, thin shavings of aged parmigiano reggiano.
 A fresh Lucali pie The eight-month old slept in his stroller under the table while the rest of us feasted. We left nothing behind but crumbs. It was a good night, and the pies — perhaps like this post? — were well worth the wait.
Boone Gorges | May 28th, 2010
CUNY Pie is mired in rhetoric. Understood as a purely gastronomic endeavor, the language of CUNY Pie gravitates toward quasi-Italian phraseology and Brooklyn neighborhood names. As understood by those who tout the project as an extended experiment in academic social spaces, CUNY Pie bears a weight far greater than even the low-grade mozzarella heaped lovelessly on a Sbarro slice. Is pizza and beer the lubricant for an academic conversation of more significance? Are instructional technology and postulation on the future of university just excuses to go to Patsy’s? Or does the situation of CUNY Pie within the CUNY Academic Commons or even CUNY as a whole challenge the presumption that there is a justifiable distinction between social and academic behavior? In what can only be described as an instance of academia’s tragic instinct to overtheorize the beautiful, pie theory threatens to outshadow pie eating.
For this reason, it was a relief to actually eat some fricking pizza last weekend at THATCamp. While other attendees went to Hooters or something, an intrepid group of campers, led by our gracious host, took a trip to Tony’s NY Pizza. Jeremy was anxious for a verdict on what he called the best pizza around. And my verdict is: It was pretty good. The pizza was slicejointesque: big pies, sweet sauce, generous amounts of dried cheese. The vegetable pie was surprisingly good, notwithstanding the odd distribution of black olives. The sausage pie offered thick, cross-cut slices of a fennely sweet sausage, which I enjoyed more than the pleasantly fatty but sort of bland meatballs. The crust had the familiar rolling docker pock-marks on the bottom, and was, like many whole pies bought from slice joints apparently used to reheating slices, pulled from the oven about 90 seconds before it should have been. The dough could have used more salt, but the cornicione, especially on the more done sides of the pizzas, had a pleasant chewiness. In sum: an above average street slice type of pie, and really quite good for NY street pie outside of NYC.
There was a bit of Twitter chatter about whether a CUNY Pie event in Fairfax, with just two out of six attendees formally connected to CUNY, really counts. For one thing, a few of the attendees have already been assimilated. Second, if you really believe the ballyhoo about CUNY Pie as a harbinger of the university to come, surely you can’t in good faith fall back on the artifical institutional boundaries that dominate traditional academia. CUNY Pie is more than a bunch of people eating pizza. It’s a movement, an ethos, which could be summed up thus: Stop yammering and eat your damn pizza.
Jody R. Rosen | February 14th, 2010
 On Friday I had pizza from Giovanna’s for the third time. All three times were delivery, which I know is not the ideal way to enjoy good pizza–but all three times were certainly tasty. It’s a great addition to SpaHa’s restaurant row on Lexington between 100th and 101st Streets. If I had one criticism, it would be that the fresh mozzarella is a little too thick, but again, this might be tastier straight out of the brick oven rather than delivered. It’s no Totonno’s–and I’m still jealous of Boone–but keep it in mind if you’re going to one of the museums on upper-Museum Mile such as El Museo del Bario or the Museum of the City of New York. Next time I’ll include photos, especially since Giovanna’s doesn’t seem to have a website yet.
Boone Gorges | February 12th, 2010
Last March, the great New York pizzeria Totonno’s shut down due to a severe fire. I was upset. After a dozen rumored opening days – including, most recently, one thwarted by Wednesday’s winter weather – today was Totonno’s first day back in almost a year.
Totonno’s has a special place in my heart, both as (arguably) the best pizzeria in New York, which is to say probably the entire world, and as one of my general favorite places to hang out and drink beer from a paper cup. I couldn’t resist getting one of the first pies out of the oven, so around noon I hopped an F train with a few friends and headed for Coney Island.
The place looked just like it did before the fire, including all the signed pictures of people I’d never heard of. There were a few people there taking pictures, but the tables were only half full. After about 20 minutes (they were doing some big takeout orders, unsurprisingly) we got our first pie, a plain:
 Totonno's plain Picking up the first slice, I was surprised by how crisp the crust was. I could grab the piece by the cornicione, and the entire slice, all the way to the tip, would support itself. Part of the issue is that the pie was a bit more well done than average, which is in my view a good thing. There was something a bit off about the dough, though, as if it had been dried out a little bit, making it a bit too dense. One of the things I love about Totonno’s is the jaw workout you get from the yeasty, chewy cornicione, but this pie’s outer ring had more structure than I expect, even from Totonno’s.
The second pizza was a pepperoni:
 Totonno's pepperoni This pie was also on the well done side (maybe because Lawrence Ciminieri was making them, instead of the skinny guy who’s usually stretching when I go), but had just a bit less structure than the first one. It was only when I started eating this pizza that I really started to remember why I love Totonno’s so much. The close-up below shows, somewhat gratuitously I might add, just how their hours-old mozzarella blackens and their pepperoni fries in its own grease in their super hot oven:
 Totonno's pepperoni closeup A stroll down the snowy beach topped off a great lunch. I couldn’t be happier that Totonno’s is open again. CUNY Pie should get out there while the gettin’s good.
Boone Gorges | December 31st, 2009
A few thoughts about toppings. I’ll start with some observations.
- I just spent some time in Wisconsin, where I saw several menus boasting “gourmet” pizzas, where ‘gourmet’ seems to mean something like ‘has a lot of stuff on it’. There’s often a theme: buffalo chicken pizza, barbecue chicken pizza (seriously, what’s with the chicken pizzas?), taco pizza (a Midwestern delicacy if I ever saw one), cheeseburger pizza, etc.
- Slice joints in NYC have a few standard topping combinations that seem a bit wacky when you take a step back. My local joint Francesco’s sells a pretty good chicken and broccoli slice. Slices with pasta (especially ziti or penne) are common throughout the city. Anna Maria in Williamsburg has a lasagna themed slice that eats like a meal.
- Some pizza places, including a fair number that carry themselves as high-falootin sorts of restaurants, gussy their pizzas up with the fanciest possible toppings. Pizzas boast shavings of 24-month aged Parmagiano Reggiano and slices of prosciutto di Parma. The ever popular Quattro Funghi can read like the mushroom aisle at Whole Foods: cremini, shitake, hen-of-the-woods, oyster, morel, truffle. Lucali charges $8 to add artichokes to a pie, which I assume means that the artichokes grown on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius where they were watered by the tears of a thousand Italian virgins.
So I’m led to ask: What is the role of toppings on a pizza? What should the role be?
In the case of taco pizza and its ilk, I assume that toppings are, as a matter of fact, the raison d’etre of the pizza. When understood correctly (and when executed well) I have no problem whatsoever with this. Look: cheddar cheese, taco meat, lettuce, tomatoes, olives, etc are delicious together, and putting them on top of a pizza, if anything, makes the combination more delightful. I might be a pizza snob of a sort, but I’m not above taco pizza.
The problem with pizzas whose merits begin and end with a set of toppings is that it creates an anti-pizza mindset in regions where such pizzas are popular. If you have enough individual pies whose existence is justified by toppings, you begin to think that pizza in general is so justified. I developed just such a conception in my own Midwestern childhood, and it took a year or two of living in New York City to begin to appreciate the error of my ways.
Fancy-pants pizza restaurants foster a related misconception of the value of toppings. It’s not that I dislike highfalutin toppings. If I could hook myself up to an IV of cured pork and aged cheese, I probably would. But my sense is that the kind of person who gravitates towards this kind of pizza joint is the angsty foodie. The more exotic (or pure, or aged, or authentic, or rare, or humanely produced, or local) the ingredient, the better it is, or so the thinking goes. Ingredient fetishism is just the kind of phenomenon that the Slice Harvester rails against, and while I’m not so quick to put it down as nothing but status-seeking yuppieism, I do think that a focus on fancy ingredients can produce a myopia similar to that of the Midwestern theme pizza lover.
So what is the proper role of toppings on a pizza? To espouse some brand of purism (one topping only! Italian toppings only! traditional Neopolitan toppings only! cheese only!) is to oversimplify. Toppings have an important practical role to play in the pizza economy (remember the lasagna slice that eats like a meal? When’s the last time you said that about a plain slice?). And there’s something transcendent about the perfect topping or two on the right kind of pizza (I don’t know where Totonno’s gets its pepperoni, but I would like to live in a house made of it), such that I would never want to do recommend against toppings altogether.
Maybe I can recommend this: People who generally order the supreme, or the lasagna slice, or the artichoke guacamole tahini pizza on rice dough, might do well to cleanse their palates with a plain pie every now and again. It might turn out that the plain pie at their favorite place is truly terrible, in which case the supreme will have proven its worth. But there’s always the chance that you might discover there’s something underneath all that crap.
|
|
Recent Comments