The above photo is of New York Pizza. I know because I took it myself on E. 42nd Street near Madison when I was back there in April.
You want to generate angry mail to your weblog? Forget about the political stuff. Just suggest in passing that it's possible to get acceptable pizza outside the state of New York. I did once before here and the tirades are still arriving.
Some folks are more passionate in defending their favorite pizzeria than their opinion of the Iraq War but it's not quite that important. I mean, it's not like where to get the best barbecued ribs or anything of the sort. Where I really part company with most people is that I've had good and bad pizza everywhere I've had pizza, and that includes New York.
I once had dreadful pizza in New York…dreadful, inedible pizza. The kind where you feel you should check and make sure you didn't bite off a hunk of the paper plate by accident. Sergio and I were walking back from the Marvel offices to our hotel in Times Square and it seemed not only like Lunch Time but Pizza Lunch Time. We both craved slices and I said to him, "Do you know a good place?" Sergio replied — in perfect English but I prefer to quote him like he doesn't talk so well — "Every place serve pizza in New York good, Mark. We pick anyplace, be fine." We picked the first shop we came to and each ordered two slices and a large Coke.
Each of our two slices got two bites. Bite One, we each could not believe how awful the pizza was. To verify, we each took Bite Two. The pizza was, indeed, that terrible. So it was into the trash with our slices, whereupon we took our large Cokes, walked directly to the next pizzeria on that street and each ordered two more slices. These were a lot better but I still didn't think they were as good as the best pizza I've had elsewhere.
Here's what I think happens. The phrase "New York Pizza" has come to mean something special. It means "The best pizza you had in New York." And I agree there's great pizza in New York. There's so much of it that there must be. So let's say you have it at a place called Angelo's in Manhattan and maybe you even have a real good slice at a place called Tony's a few blocks away. That becomes New York Pizza to you…the standard against which all are judged.
By that, I mean all slices anywhere, even in New York. You go to Ray's over on 7th and the pizza there isn't as fine as Angelo's. But for some reason you don't say, "Hmm…some pizza in New York isn't so good." You just write that off. It's not New York Pizza even though it's pizza and it's in New York. You prefer to think of New York Pizza as the pie they serve at Angelo's and maybe Tony's.
Then one day you're in Los Angeles or somewhere else that's not New York and pizza becomes an issue. You compare whatever they have there to Angelo's and you say "This isn't as good as New York Pizza." Which isn't fair, just as it wouldn't be fair for me to compare Vito's Pizza in Los Angeles (maybe the best I've had) with that place Sergio and I walked out of in Manhattan and say, "L.A. Pizza is better." I also think people are unfair to factor the pizza from big chains into the contest. People judge non-N.Y. Pizza by Domino's, Papa John's, Little Caesar's, etc. But when they think of New York Pizza, they never average in all those ubiquitous Pizza Huts and Sbarro you find every other block in that town.
(My friend Randy used to insist that L.A. Pizza was awful compared to N.Y. Pizza…but his example of L.A. Pizza was a slice he once had at the airport. He refused to admit that all airport pizza is awful in every city. On the same trip where I took the above photo, I had a slice at JFK that they could have taken out and used to patch the runway.)
The point is that any pizza you sample anywhere is likely to fail when measured against the best pizza you ever had. But that's one restaurant versus another restaurant. It's not all the pizza in New York compared to all the pizza in some other city. There is great pizza in New York — I've had a lot of it — but there's great pizza everywhere if you go to the right places.
Let a new onslaught of hate mail commence.