Pie by the Pound: "How many disgusted faces do you think they have to look at every day?"

Last week I ate pizza with my esteemed friend and comrade John McLean. He is a great guy, so kind, so generous. He used to live in Brooklyn and we were in a band together called Crooked Boner. Sike! That's not what it was called at all, but that would be a good band name. Anyway, John McLean lives in Athens now, where he plays guitar in Dead Dog and he also does dishes at a "Pizza Restaurant" there, which has okay pizza for Georgia but everyone dips it in ranch dressing. And the fact that he lives "afar" is real sad because I miss him daily, but it's okay, because then when we see each other it's very triumphant. And so it was this Christmas. Three wise men brought me a Christmas miracle and that miracle was John coming into my job and getting a cheeseburger. And one of those wise men was Kever! And then we hung out so damn hard you would not believe it and the next day we ate pizza together.

Our first stop was this weird place called Pie by the Pound. It had this overwhelming Reform Jewish Teenager vibe to it, which I am very familiar with, having been to like 8,000 Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. I felt like if Israel went totally bananas and like made all the Jews go into a giant spaceship that was part spaceship, part contained, flying city, and part like, intergalactic cruise liner, and then like, in four generations when none of the people alive on the spaceship even remember Earth, one of them reads about pizza in one of the Olden Tomes of Olden Tymes and is like, "I'm gonna open up a pizzeria." And this is that pizzeria. I don't even think this pizza was kosher, so I'm not even sure why it felt so Jewish to me in there. Maybe it's because the place was decorated like a JCC rec. room.

So the thing with this place, and I should've taken a picture of the display (oh wait, here's one I found on the internet!), is that they have these giant ovular pies and then you order by weight. Not a bad idea, but the pizza sucks and the shit pictured above cost me $3.94 and wasn't even as big as a regular normal slice. And it suuuuuucked. And it was cooked in like, one of those giant toaster ovens like they have in a sleepaway camp cafeteria. And did I mention it sucked?

When we got our regular pizza the lady also gave us this thing to taste, which is that same regular pizza with cubed tomatoes, mozzarella and basil on top and said we should try it because it's "a little more interesting" or something. We ate this first and were just like "Oy vey! If this is the more interesting option I am loathe to taste their less interesting choices!" (Except John didn't say "oy vey" because as goyem he's not allowed to, he said "gosh darnit.") And did I mention that the regular pizza sucked? It tasted like when you chew all of the flavor out of a piece of Juicy Fruit and you are just still chewing on it anyway out of habit and then you suddenly notice that what you are chewing on doesn't taste like ANYTHING AT ALL. That's what it tasted like.

Rating:


Pie by the Pound - $????
124 4th Ave (12th & 13th)
New York, NY 10003

Slice, the perfect food: "A terrifying glimpse into our dystopian future."

Slice: the perfect food is one of the creepiest places I've ever been. Their logo seems to be an inverted Tri-Force. Never has a symbol of such incredible good been flipped over and used for something so evil since the Catholic Church turned the Upsidedown Cross logo on its head! This place is not just selling "pizza," (in fact, they're not selling pizza at all, but more on that soon), they are selling a lifestyle of smug superiority. This is the culinary equivalent of that piano guy on NPR who used to sing songs that sounded like the beginning of Frasier and were essentially about how working class people are stupid.

Let me just quote this text for you in case you can't read it in the photo:

Slice is a wonderful invention. It is one of the greatest inventions of all time. It is the perfect food. The perfect food is much better than the perfect painting because you can eat the perfect food, and it tastes good. The perfect painting never tastes good. The perfect painting tastes like canvas and oil, which tastes horrible. 

 The perfect food is also much healthier than the perfect painting. The perfect food is natural and organic while the perfect painting is toxic. If you eat the perfect food you will come away feeling giddy, and jubilant. If you eat the perfect painting, you will come away feeling poisoned.

Slice, the perfect food is something like a pizza. If you look at it, it appears to be a pizza. As you eat it, it sits on your tongue much as a pizza would sit. But in fact, the perfect food is vastly superior to pizza, so enjoy.

It's really like they did a focus group based on everything that I hate and invented this place just to irritate me. We ordered one plain slice, which was charmingly called "the Simpleton" on the menu, at 2:21:26, according to our receipt. 27 minutes and 52 seconds later, after a lengthy conversation about that weird propaganda they had stenciled on their wall, a game of yahtzee and a game of chess, we were handed this thing:

For now let's briefly overlook the fact that it took them almost half an hour to defrost a supermarket pizza, cut it into a triangle, and throw a sloppy handful of parsley on it. Instead let's revisit some of their rhetoric before we even begin to discuss this shitshow they are calling food. The entire tone of is so whimsical and self-satisfied I want to find whoever was responsible for writing that copy and shake him down for his bus tokens. This is some seriously sanctimonious bullshit! These people must be, in the words of my amazing friend Meredith Gaydosh, so fucking delighted with themselves. And it is sickening. I am getting so mad thinking about this shit, just do me a favor and go back and read it all over again in "come to Butthead" voice.

Now let's talk about the fact that this is "vastly superior" to pizza. Apparently, in whatever fantasyland the copy writers for Slice, the perfect food live, "vastly superior" means smaller, more expensive, and less delicious. It also means that there is no longer any crust but there is an enormous, sloppy pile of parsley. As we were eating this... thing, Eric looked contemplative and said, "I think this is what the normal characters in A Clockwork Orange eat." Laszlo looked at both of us really excited and was all, "I was just thinking that this is what the pizza is like in Logan's Run!"

Rating:


Slice, the perfect food - $3.82
535 Hudson St (Perry & Charles)
New York, NY 10014

K! Pizzacone: "Shame the original pizza in a cup guy went out of business."

Now I know, what you're thinking, "I thought this was Slice Harvester, not Cone Harvester. Where does he get off?" Because that's pretty much what Paulie said to me when I told him and the gang we were going to head into K! Pizzacone. In fact, everybody thought it was a bad idea except Peter, who understood my morbid curiosity about such a fascinating culinary anomaly; and who I realized right then that I knew from the week that I spent sleeping on a hammock in the woods next to Megan's house two or three years ago, because he was living in a tent in those same woods and we had drank some beers together. And not a bullshit tent, mind you, like a really sturdy canvas tent that was pitched atop a wooden platform and looked like something from a WWII movie and was probably the size of my apartment in Brooklyn. Anyway, since I am really the only person involved with S.H. who has any actual decision-making power, (besides Nate Stark, I guess), consensus was a non-issue and we ventured in.


We ordered a 'Small, Margherita Pizzacone' (to split 5 ways) and immediately began to feel nervous. The proprietress of the establishment opened up a crazy looking deep freeze unit that emitted that wild "cold steam" or whatever like they had coming off the dry ice beakers in the horror movie tv show that was on channel 9 when I was a kid. She removed a premade, frozen "bread cone" from within the depths of this sci-fi meatlocker and placed in on some kind of stand in a convection/microwave "quick cooker." There was already way too much technology involved in this food and it had barely even been prepared.

When the thing was done, she filled it with cheese and sauce that she scooped out of little trays like they have in Subway, and then sprayed a bottle of what turned out to be some kind of "butter spread"-type substance into the recesses of the cone. Then she placed it in the oven one more time.

While it was cooking, we watched in horror as an informational video about pizzacones played on two televisions, just a few seconds apart. It made everything look so disgusting.

When they handed me my pizzacone, I was a little disappointed it wasn't less grand, but then again, I did just order the margherita. I took my first bite and chewed contemplatively, eying the expressions on my comrade's faces as they were presented with the pizzacone and weighed whether or not they would take a bite. It tasted like "butter," which is to say, it tasted like fake butter, there was absolutely no sauce in my bite, and the cheese was incredibly weird and synthetic. In short, I loved it. As everyone passed the pizza pon the left hand side (bom biddilee bom biddilee bom bom bom biddilee bom biddilee), the comments started to roll in:

"Too much cheese."

"I wish there was more sauce."

"This tastes like butter."

"This is amazing."

"Tastes like I'm eating a bowl of pizza hut."

As the cone made it's second trip around the cipher, everyone seemed to grow tired. The whole thing was almost done, and I was the only one that was still excited about this weird thing, although my enthusiasm quickly waned when I began chewing my third bite. This thing was probably the most disgusting food object I have ever eaten. When I was unable to pawn the cone off on anyone else, I simply threw the remnants into the garbage. As we were leaving, Peter said, very succinctly, "Well, I definitely feel grosser than before I ate that."

Rating:

While the rating system is usually on a scale of 8, that didn't seem like enough for this horror show, so K! Pizzacone gets 0 out of 20 slices.

K! Pizzacone - $3.60

325 5th Avenue (32nd & 33rd)

New York, NY 10016

Lazzara's: "I am the resurrection and the slice."

Lazarra's Pizza is totally full of shit and I am mad at them. This place is cool if you want to eat pizza on an airship, which is what it feels like when you stare at a huge plasma tv screen while sitting under a tin ceiling and steampunk ceiling fan. Maybe these people would want to eat here, but I think human beings, or "yuman beans" as my father might say, who want actual pizza would not be interested in this place.


They only have square pizza here. But it's not a grandma slice, it's a what they're calling regular pizza. This is like when you make pizza at home and don't have a pizza stone yet so you end up rolling out your dough on a cookie sheet. In a word, unprofessional. The thing that really pisses me off about it is that it tastes really good! It's super buttery and in the words of Leah, the crust kind of tastes like "when you get on a pancake when you're lucky." As in, that rad buttery burnt shit. The slice had perfect ratios, great crunch and the sauce had a bit of a bite. It was really delicious, much to my chagrin.

At one point I took a bite and the cheese stretched almost an entire foot. Leah said, "not to be totally gross, but it's sort of like ovulation." Caroline and I both laughed but I have to be honest and admit that I was only laughing because Leah said "ovulation." Despite the fact that I'm a guy with a good attitude towards menstruation (that's right, I'm the guy), I've never actually ovulated so I'm not quite sure what she's talking about. Whatever, it's always funny to compare food to bodily functions. If anyone feels compelled to graphically explain whatever I missed in the comments section, I'd be really pleased, as I'm sure would most of my readers.

Aside from the fact that it's not real pizza, my big beef with Lazarra's is that they have a million signs all over the damn place that say their slice costs $1.50, and then the slice actually costs $1.64. What a misleading bummer. At least say "$1.50 + tax". Seriously. That kind of bullshit has probably cost many an unsuspecting sidewalk stroller $0.14 she didn't expect to spend. What bullshit. I can't deny that it's really delicious, though.

Rating:


Rating if it were actual pizza:


Lazzara's - $1.64
221 West 38th Street (7th & 8th)
New York, NY 10018