Mamani Halal Pizza: "This was actually kind of alright!"

SOOOOOO, on Monday morning at 10:30 am I was meeting this guy from Newfoundland called Steve Dejected on the corner of 1st Avenue and 14th Street to go eat pizza, right? I never met the guy, but he's friends with a lot of friends and he was in town from far away. Also, I later learned that he went to high school with a girl who pulled a knife on me in a park in Montreal, the only other "Newfie" I have ever met. And this dude doesn't have a phone that works in America, so at like, 9:40 he called me from a payphone and I missed it and couldn't call him back but he left a message saying he was still heading to the corner and let's meet up and whatever.

So of course, I'm running late, but luckily the trains are running super fast and I get there at 10:33 and start looking around when I realize I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THIS GUY LOOKS LIKE, and all of a sudden everyone has become a Potential Canadian. And then I start realizing, I'm not even sure if this person is cisgendered, maybe they go by Steve but look like a lady or whatever, so now I'm not just staring at all the bio-men coming out of the train station, I am looking at EVERYONE inquisitively like, "are you Steve? are you a Canadian punk?" And then there is this guy with this stupid scarf on and a peacoat and khaki pants and desert boots eating a pastry, but he's just standing around on the corner right by the subway and MAYBE IT'S HIM, right? Maybe he just doesn't look punk anymore. Lord knows I sometimes don't look punk anymore, although on that particular day I had a leather jacket on and looked punk enough that LES Jules called me "brother" when he spanged me, although his tune quickly changed when I didn't give it to him and he feebly shouted "YOU ARE A POSER!"

So anyway, I walked up to the peacoat guy, and I was like, "are you Canadian?" And he was! But that was the wrong question, so then I was like, "Are you waiting for someone?" and he looked at me like I was crazy, and so I was all, "sorry, uh... sorry. I haven't had my coffee yet. I just... it's just... I'm supposed to meet a friend of a friend on this corner and I have no idea what he looks like." So then I texted my pal Erick, and was all "what does Steve look like??" and Erick was all "Tall. Punk! Glasses... Classic 'punk kid on your couch' look. Patches, etc." And then I see this guy come ambling down the way in a denim vest and leather gloves and too-short pants with a baseball cap on and I was like, "this is my dude," and it was.

So then we started out to eat pizza, but check this out: every pizza place was closed! Because duh, who eats pizza at 10:30 in the morning? They open at noon. So we sat around Tompkins Square for a while and talked about stuff punks talk about, and then we went over to this one place on Ave. A and we got one slice there and then headed home because I had very special Valentine's Day plans with my Very Special Lady and didn't have time to spend all day hanging out with some Canadian I don't even know!

But never fear, fans of Steve. I am meeting him at noon today and then we are going to eat the rest of those slices we never got to eat on Monday. But we did get to eat one slice, at Mamani Pizza.

Okay, I think this place post-dates most of my tenure on Avenue A. I remember wandering past it a few times in the past couple years, but it definitely wasn't there when I was a yute, because it was San Loco in those days. Mamani sells dollar slices that look nasty but are actually pretty alright.

This slice was like decent pizza from another town. It is too thick, but the dough was fluffy and not too dense. And the ingredients seemed to be of alright quality. The cheese had a good elasticity and the sauce wasn't bad, the twin pitfalls of most dollar slices. I actually liked this pizza quite a bit, although it's definitely not a Crucial New York Slice. But fuck it, it's a buck. You're probably better off here than at Nino's, to be honest.

Rating:


Dollar Slice Rating:


Mamani Pizza - $1.00
151 Ave A (9th & 10th)
New York, NY 10009