Don Pepe Pizza: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

I haven't been to Penn Station in years, but it was here that I found the subterranean jungle I was expecting to find at Port Authority. (If I haven't been to either of these places in a long time you might wonder, how do I leave town? The answer is: usually in some touring band's van.) It is seriously such a rad and wonderful place! I bet if I had to commute from Jersey or Long Island to Midtown and I had to come hang around here every day I would be hell of bummed on the place, but just wandering in with Eliza and BBC (happy birthday, buddy!), we were having a blast watching all the tourists and salmon-walking through seas of LI Frat Jocks, current-day Sweathogs, and their various female counterparts.

Somewhere amidst this vast underground labyrinth of commerce, we stumbled upon Don Pepe Pizza. Bedecked in neon lights, which my crappy Phone-Cam was not so great at photographing, this place looked straight out of how I imagined the near-future San Francisco of William Gibson's Bridge Trilogy. Granted, Gibson is unbearably corny at moments, but sometimes a guy needs to just check out and turn his brain off, and I think you'd all prefer I read trashy sci-fi than walk around wearing a fake mustache dipped in homemade ether or a clown nose full of gold Dutch Boy spraypaint. ANYWAY.

It seems I forgot to take a picture of the slice at Don Pepe pizza, however, I was able to zoom in and expand the section of the above image that contains the pizza. Notice Chris studiously at work on the Burnt Black Crust Uncertainty Principle (BBCUP), which calculates the degree to which char marks on the bottom of a pizza slice affect its deliciousness.

So, here's that picture. As you can see from the crease lines, this slice was crispy enough, but it's crusty foundation bore too much weight in cheese, forcing it to fold far before the ideal point of roughly 1"-1.5" from the tip. Luckily, this was pretty delicious cheese, and the slice was structurally sound enough that it didn't break into pieces, so it was easy enough to eat the wreckage. This slice could've used a little more sauce, but the sauce that was there was delicious, the cheese tasted great and had a good texture, and the crust had a wonderful crunch. All in all, this may have been the most pleasant surprise of a slice I've had in quite a while.

Rating:

Don Pepe Pizza - $2.75

2 Penn Plaza

New York, NY 10121