It’s at the heart of culinary New York, this thing, this wonderment, that fills and flutters the ventricles and valves of the most hyper-systolic food scene in America, and which sends the pulses of eaters, like me, into spasms of tachycardiac joy. Sure, it’s pizza we’re talking about. But not just any pie. Not that deep-dish casserole shit they serve in Chicago. Not that no-pride-in-my pants, epicene-crusted New Haven-style mumbo jumbo. Not that proto-fascist Neapolitan stuff, with its brown-shirted skein of Italian National Unification regulations about how “real” pizza should be made, in what kind of oven, with what grade of ingredients, and by whom.
What we are talking about here, friends, is the New York utility slice: that 1/8th portion of mostly-cooked pizza, held at room temperature, in near-proximity to a city sidewalk, under restaurant glass, for minutes, hours, days even, until it’s returned to an oven for a final, hot-hot reheating, and then plated on picnic-grade white paper. All of this is then served—this massive slice of pizza on a grease-soaked plate—with a contemptuousness so aggressive, so purely hostile, as to successfully flirt with something akin to big-city affection.
The New York utility slice is the apex predator of modern gastronomy. It kills hunger with maximally ferocious flavor, and at absolutely minimum financial cost to its eater.
This alone ranks the New York utility slice among the very best of American street foods, and as a gustatory marvel of cheesy goodness that delivers mind-blowing savor in a decidedly hand-held form that can be had everywhere, anytime, across the breadth and width of the Big Apple, and for virtually no money.
And that makes New York pizza’s greatness unassailable. Because no matter where I go among its five boroughs—maybe Manhattan, maybe Queens, maybe, even, the Bronx—the utility slices I find there make me want to stab myself in the neck with the plastic fork of incredulity. That’s how good they are. Even the stuff that sucks is good. Because New York pizza at its worst is still better than Chicago pizza at its best.
How do they do it, these New York pizza makers? What makes their pizza better than all the rest? Is the greatness of New York pizza found in the anatomy of the slice, that magical ratio of cheese-to-toppings-and-crust? Or is it something more ephemeral? Is its magic to be revealed in the delicate interplay of aromatic spices seated within the slice’s ever-narrowing sluice of super-acidic tomato sauce?
Bollocks if I know.
Here are the facts on New York pizza as I understand them: unlike the fresh mozzarella cheese and raw tomatoes used on Neapolitan pizza, New York pizza is, by contrast, made with a hard, aged mozzarella, and plied with a sauce of cooked tomatoes that contain flavoring agents Americans have long associated with pizza-like goodness: oregano, basil, and garlic. Not to mention New York pizza’s high-gluten dough is never rolled, but always tossed by hand, and then baked in a gas oven, at temperatures lower than those required by its Neapolitan counterpart (which is cooked with a hotter-burning wood that also imparts the Neapolitan’s signature cornicione, that wood-charred rim that runs along its upper, outer-most crust).
It’s tap water, of all things, that purportedly imbues New York pizza dough with the mineral-rich flavor for which it’s so deservedly famous. New York City’s municipal water supply comes from the Catskill and Delaware watershed, and yet it still manages to taste like dirty dishwater when issued from one’s hotel faucet. But New York-style pizza makers swear by it. They truck Manhattan tap water all over the country on the certain belief that it will give their Florida-made and Arizona-made pizzas that special New York zing.
I am dubious of magical thinking. I have a different theory, altogether.
I believe New York pizza gets its uniquely punchy flavor from its heft. As with most things we put in our mouths—ahem—size really does matter. The New York utility slice is typically 9” to 10” in length, a not-inconsiderable, Ron Jeremy-like dimension that compels eaters unable to unhinge their jaws to, instead, fold the slice in half, lengthwise, and eat it as they would a ginormous New York taco.
It’s this structural dynamic of the utility slice, this fundamental construction in the very underpinnings of its architecture, that is at the root of New York pizza’s greatness. This I believe. Because by folding the slice in two, you’re effectively doubling the surface area that’s entering your mouth. You’re doubling the amount of cheese, the amount of sauce, the amount of flavor-giving grease, and in so doing, doubling the gustatory pleasure delivered in every bite.
Which begs the question: where should you get your very own utility slice of New York pizza?
That depends on you.
Fancy yourself cool? A hipster even? Then head over Vinnie’s Pizzeria, at 148 Bedford Avenue, in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, the very epicenter of all-things-hip. Order a slice of pepperoni, as I did on a recent visit, and you’ll receive one of the most sublime, most ethereal, servings of New York pie you’re likely to ever encounter.
And just how good is the pizza at Vinnie’s? Image Vinnie’s crust as a magic carpet ride on which a perfect amalgamation of meat and cheese blithely float, together, over Brooklyn, surfing its late-summer air in an almost hallucinatory trance, and you’ll have some idea of the kind of excellence Vinnie’s has been serving up since 1960. Vinnie’s pizza is a marvel, and it’s something you should be stuffing into your own gob hole every chance you get.
Maybe you’re not quite that hip? Perhaps you’ve aged out of all that sock-headed, neck-bearded nonsense? Not to worry. I’ve got just the place for you: Artichoke Pizza, at 1410 Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, a stone’s throw from Times Square, for when you’re feeling a tad more adult, a tad more touristy.
Artichoke Pizza is a true, no-bullshit zone. No miasma of hipness here, friend-o. Only serious New York pizza for eaters serious about devouring Manhattan’s very best in the most utilitarian, wood-paneled room Midtown has to offer.
Order the margherita, as I did, and buckle up for one those white-knuckled culinary thrill-rides you never see coming: a positively gigantic slice of molten-hot pie that barely fits on two paper plates, and that delivers one of the most intensely tomatoey moments of your gustatory life. We’re talking tomato like a flavor bomb, detonated on intake for maximum effect. Tomato like a punch to the head. Tomato like sudden religion, like a new way of life.
And yet, this slice offers more complexity than that: crust that’s magnificently crusty; no meat; precious little cheese. A less-is-more culinary minimalism that focuses the eater’s attention on the unrelenting tsunami of tomatoey umami flooding her mouth as the pleasure receptors in her frontal lobe start to short-circuit and melt. All of this then topped with a few leaves of cooked basil to serve as a slightly bitter, entirely herbaceous counterpoint to the river of red sauce inundating that crust. And my God, that crust.
So.
Do me a favor.
The next time you’re in New York, grab a utility slice of pizza. Any slice will do. The cheaper the better. Find a park bench, or a front stoop, or a street curb, even, and sit. Once seated, fire up some New York music—some Television, some Velvet Underground, some Jim Carroll Band, perhaps—and turn it up, way up, way loud. Then go ahead and eat. Eat your slice of New York pie, squatting, as you are, amid New York’s funk and filth, and in that moment, find bliss in the certain knowledge that you’ve arrived at the very quintessence of this place, and that what you’re now experiencing is the very best of what this magical city has to offer.
Perfect pizza on a dirty street. Eaten with your bare hands.
Just like a Lou Reed song. Just like a real New Yorker.
Contact: chrisopher@proletariateats.com
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