Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Mt. Carmel Pizzeria: "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed."

Post-Patsy's, Megan, Cinque and I headed over for our next slice at Mt. Carmel, which was a pretty picture perfect pizzeria.

Sadly, the pizza was not nearly as perfect, though it looked good, and certain aspects of it were totally superb.


If this pizza had a better sauce it would be the King of all Pizzas. Instead it is like, the Duke of Corn Syrupy Sauce or the Earl of Biggest Bummers. Honestly, the slice looked so perfect, smelled phenomenal and seemed to be cooked totally right, but when I bit into it and the sweet sauce squirted out, and chemically sweet at that, I felt like a pretty heinous atrocity had been committed on my expectations. The dough on this slice was impeccable, the crust, unstoppable. But that fucking sauce, man, it ruined things for me. Cinque put it very succinctly when he said, "I'm most pleased with the texture, rather than the flavor of the whole thing." If you could somehow sneak Patsy's sauce onto the pies here you'd have the best street slice in the world. Instead you just have a major disappointment.

My relationship to this slice gives me a bit of insight into how a lot of my high school teachers must have felt, like, "you have such potential, if only you weren't drenched in corn syrup!" Except in my case, replace "drenched in corn syrup" with "stoned all the time." Who knows, maybe the slice I had at Mt. Carmel was having a hard time dealing with being smart and weird and needed a coping mechanism, and maybe corn syrup not only makes it tangibly less smart, but gives it an excuse to act like a maniac. Maybe the slice at Mt. Carmel just thinks that the only way it can possibly handle being stuck in a pizzeria all day, with a bunch of boring other slices who don't even like Operation Ivy, instead of doing something interesting, is by slathering itself in the crappiest sauce. Maybe if the pizzerias in this country were a little more engaging and interesting and a little less based on weird teleological constructs like standardized testing, slices like the one I ate wouldn't have to numb themselves with chemicals, and they could go on to be productive pies when they grow up. The question you've got to ask yourself is really this, dude: was that slice sick, or was it the product of a sick society? Think about that shit, man.

Mt. Carmel Pizzeria
345 E 115th St
New York, NY 10029

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