Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Pizza Nova: "I can't think of anything"

With my whole demeanor revitalized by the presence of one of my favorite dudes, I asked Mr. Tooth if he would be down to help me check out a couple of more places. So we strolled down Dyckman and hit up Pizza Nova.


I was initially turned off by the shape of the crust. It looked like a narrow wall someone had made with their thumb after pushing out the dough purely by hand or with a roller. It looked like the crust on the pizza they have at ice skating rinks, or the kind of pizza they have in crappy places outside New York like Albany. But I am a man on a mission, so I paid my $2.25 and was pleasantly surprised by the size of the slice. At least I was getting my money's worth, right? Keep in mind that the lighting in this place, though it seemed white, coupled with the crappy camera on my iphone, seemed to be in collusion to make every picture I tried to take of this pizza come out in weird, psychedelic colors:



The first thing that Toof and me noticed was how much this pizza looked and smelled like the plain slice at the Turkish pizza places in Berlin. Sweet Tooth talked about stifling a sneeze while reading Maya Deren's diary at a museum in Boston while I thoughfully chewed the tentative first bites of this slice. There were a million things wrong with it, in fact it was so wrong that it was almost good in its own right. But something was fundamentally wrong, in my book, and I couldn't figure out what it was until I took a sip of water and had another bite. It was too sweet. The dough was sweet, the sauce had waaaay too much fennel seed, even the cheese seemed somehow sweet. If that's your thing, I bet you'd love this slice, and it was a lot of food for the $2.25 it cost, but I just wasn't totally into it. Sweet T and Me both agree that the bread was too doughy, too.

Pizza Nova
150 Dyckman St
New York, NY 10040

5 comments:

  1. isn't pizza nova a chain?
    i have seen many pizza novas in toronto, where i am from.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This really is the most amazing blog ever! I had a discussion w/ a guy I was giving a massage to today (I am a licenced massage therapist) and he was asking if I knew of any good pizza places here in town (of Naples, FL). I had to give a shout to Peppi's Pizza on 41 North. I said they serve olde school pizza, a stout Italian guy actually(probaby the Dad) throws the dough in the air and catches it, looks to be like his son runs the register. That is the best pizza you can ever get, when it is a small, family run place, where the cook probably sweats a little into the dough, got drunk on too much red wine the night before, after boffing his old lady. These are real people making your pizza, not something corporate, with frozen dough that was probably made like a month before (you know your pizza huts, dominoes, shit like that!)
    So, kids spend your hard earned money in the little family joints around the country, and if you don't have anything like that in your neck of the woods, do whatever it takes to open your own family run joint! This is what makes America a great place. Real, authentic people!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. blah, blah, blah, pizza, pizza, pizza, I'm so bloody bored 2 death!!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. You were too kind to this place, i went today based on your review because i kind of like sweet pizza a bit;, but pizza Nova is disgusting, their sauce is literally Hunts tomato sauce...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Terrible pizza, totally inedible. It has been a long time since I have had a slice that was this bad. Keep walking around the corner to Italian Pizza at 94 Nagle Avenue or the old school Pizza Palace at 121 Dyckman.

    ReplyDelete