Some lowlife stole my girlfriend's bike.

This is the bike, except I swapped out the drops for riser bars and they have these kind of crappy, light brown, padded grips. If you see it around, send me an email or write a comment, this is such a stupid bummer. Better yet, if you see it around, push whatever punk ass motherfucker is riding it off, kick him in the teeth, and bring it over to Second Chance. Leave the bike in the backyard and tell whoever is bartending that you just returned Colin's girlfriend's bike and that they should give me a call and he will come in right now and buy you a drink.

Little Italy Pizza: "Some sacrifices must be made."

When my friend Good Kid Paulie called me to let me know that he was gonna be back up North from the Southern depths of Chattanooga, TN where he's been living, I wondered if he would find the time to come eat pizza with me. And luckily enough, he followed up his announcement by asking when I was free to eat pizza. And so, when he got here, we went out pizza eating! I was excited because in the time since Paulie has split Brooklyn for the mountains and valleys of beautiful Tennessee, he's started making pizza. Right before he moved last November, when he was living on my storage loft, Paulie started getting really into making bread. It was certainly an uphill battle, but he got a lot of books out of the library and learned a bunch of shit, and now he's started making dough to make pizzas out of! It's always nice to see when a friend's hobby becomes a pretty serious passion. In fact, I heard, (and it was later verified by Paulie, himself), that he recently got chastised by his roommates for filling up his oven with bricks so he could cook pizza better. So look out for an update on Paulie's homemade pizza next time I make it out to Da Noog.

Anyway, when Paulie came out to eat pizza, he brought a couple of Chattanooga friends with him, Liz, Kathleen and Peter, and an old Slice Harvester favorite, Jordan DeVylder.

Our first stop was Famous Little Italy Pizza, which seems to be a sibling store to the Little Italy Pizza that I went to with Eliza and BBC not too long ago. It had the same weird corrugated metal walls, and felt just as awkward and weird. I warned everybody that it wasn't going to be very good, which it wasn't, although Kathleen, Liz and Peter, the Chattanoogans, were pretty into it. The sauce on this slice was good, and the cheese was decent, but the crust was really brittle and weird, almost like Mercato, or something. Paulie said he would be happy with this slice for $2, but at $2.75 it is unfair.

I forgot to photograph this slice, although it looks just like the one at the last place. Instead here is a picture of a young lady REALLY enjoying a slice of pizza and bottled coke from Famous Little Italy Pizza.

Rating:

Famous Little Italy Pizza - $2.75

333 5th Ave (32nd & 33rd)

New York, NY 10016

Ciao Bella Napoli: "The best of this bunch."

Leaving Broadway Pizza, Johnny, Caroline and I ran into a friend of ours buying a salad at the Sunac Fancy Food store where Caroline had stopped in to get a ginger beer digestif. We were a little shocked to see a shlub like us in such a ritzy neighborhood and I expressed that sentiment in the form of a "what the hell are YOU doing here?"

"Well," our friend began, a discreet look of mischief crossing his features, "it's actually kind of embarrassing."

We looked quizzically, perhaps intrigued.

"Fuck it, I'll tell you. I was getting a colonic. It was amazing. I feel so GOOD right now. Colin, you really gotta try this with all that pizza you eat."

So, I haven't set it up yet, but I'm gonna figure out how much a colonic costs and then set up a meter on the side of the page to see how long it takes for Slice Harvester readers to donate me enough money to get my bowels cleansed. And while we're on the topic of donations, I should mention that things were slow for a minute, but a sweet dude from Jamaica, Queens named Vincent Cavazos just picked up all your slack and sent Fifty Big Ones my way! Looks like I will be paying my electricity bill this month, after all. You can check out Vincent's name in print, along with all the other donors, on my brand new "Benefactors" page! And everyone else, follow his lead. When people google you, do you want them to find your defunct Friendster profile, or see your name in a list of True American Heroes?

Blah blah. Anyway, we were in such a sour mood when we left Broadway Pizza that we stopped in a Goodwill for like, an hour and looked at shit. I ended up getting this cool afro-beat record and a Cypress Hill tape, and Johnny got a whole stack of LPs, including this fantastic Frank Sinatra disc I had never heard before, and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Which he is displaying in the below photography of Ciao Bella Napoli.

Of no relation to the mediocre, Olive-Gardeny Ciao Bella Napoli at York and 78th, this place is actually cousins with Bella Napoli at Madison and 30th (which I have already eaten at, but have not yet reviewed, so you'll have to wait and see how it compares). This restaurant, though, is a pretty incredible place. When we first walked in, it smelled pungently and strongly of a scent Caroline described as "man cologne". She immediately went to the bathroom and me and Johnny were swooped upon by a kindly, hirsute gentleman who seemed to be the proprietor of the store. He saw Johnny's Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and immediately grew nostalgic for his teens and early 20s in South Brooklyn, when "things was actually like that."

We got our slice from Tony Manero, and set upon it like a pack of ravenous wolves, although soon we were transformed into a pack of nonplussed, unexcited wolves. This slice was just a bit above average. It wasn't bad, and unlike some of the other pizza C, J and me ate that day, it actually qualified as pizza. But it wasn't all that, you know? I'm just gonna quote the exact phrases I wrote in my notes, with selective italicizing.

"Sauce is okay."

"Cheese is so-so."

"Crust is alright."

"Greasy enough."

These are not the words of an excited person. Nor are they necessarily the words of a sad person, either. Just someone resigned to the ultimate banality of living, who has given up on the notion that fun or adventure can be injected into her mundane life. In short, someone who really needs to read Evasion! Nyuck nyuck nyuck.

It bares noting that Caroline absolutely HATED this slice.

Rating:

Ciao Bella Napoli - $2.35

257 7th Ave (24th & 25th)

New York, NY 10001

Broadway Pizza: "So many major disappointments in this neighborhood."

Broadway Pizza is a horrible shame. It is as hot as the roiling pits of hell, and twice as horrible. The people that work there are kind enough, but that just lulls you into a false sense of security. Do not come here for pizza. I will say, though, that there was a really enormous upstairs seating area, and while it was far too hot to be comfortable this time of year, and I imagine it might be cold in the Winter, during the Spring and Autumn this seems like a nice place to come and get something small like a coffee or a can of soda, and just wander upstair to read or write and be totally left alone.

This slice is a terrible travesty. The first bite, which I took, had no sauce at all and was totally disgusting. It was the best part of this shitty food-slab. Caroline took a bite next, immediately spit it out, and then just shook her head back and forth, slowly and repeatedly, for the rest of our internment here. Johnny got the first bite with sauce and told me it was "mealy," which seemed odd to me, because how can sauce be mealy? But he was right, it was. Like a bad apple. Caroline finally broke her silence to tell us that the sauce "kind of looks like when people try to replicate vaginal bleeding in horror movies." Ugh. Dee-skusting.

Rating:

Broadway Pizza - $2.75

1157 Broadway (at 27th)

New York, NY 10001

Rosa's Pizza / Manhattan Heroes / Brooklyn Cupcakes: "Ghosts of Yesterday."

Me and Johnny were both really excited about Rosa's. I had eaten a few memorable slices at the corner of 27th and 7th in my time, quite a few of them with Ben Who Lunch, my errant Chicken Parm Correspondent. Johnny remembers it because his friend Dave Herman, who runs the awesome City Reliquary Museum & Civic Organization, used to take him there. When we walked in, it was not the place either one of us remembered. I can't recall what the interior used to look like, but this time it was full of weird marble counters and floors, with these silly gold leaf autumnal leaves or something, and it looked a little uncomfortably clean and new, definitely not the place Johnny and I remembered. It was also full of Lonesome Lunchers when we walked in. Every single table in the joint had a single eater seated against the wall, looking at their food the way people stare at their drink while their date is in the bathroom at a bar and they don't know what to do with themselves.

The slice was a fucking bummer. It was like a toy piece of pizza you would give to a dog or a toddler as a chew toy. Totally rubbery dough, too much cheese and the cheese was the texture of melted plastic, or like, taffy or something. The sauce was as orange as The Situation's abs, and the whole thing tasted more like a crappy, canned ravioli than a piece of pizza. This shit was just totally gross and not worth it. Let us all have a moment of silence for whatever the place that used to be here was called. One less decent pizzeria in New York City. Farewell, sweet prince.

Rating:

Rosa's Pizza - $2.75

168 W 27th St (at 7th)

New York, NY 10001

Cavallo's: "True American Spirit."

So, not too long ago, I got to go out and eat pizza with Slice Harvester's old friend Caroline Paquita and our friend Johnny Coast. Johnny is a grown up crusty living the dream, who makes handbuilt bicycles, and is probably the sweetest person I know, and no amount of dreadlocks and tattooed gauntlets can disguise that fact. I have barely known Johnny for years and he has always just seemed like the absolute nicest guy on Earth. And waddaya ya know? I wasn't wrong about that shit because I am a good judge of character and fuck you if you don't believe me!

Our first stop was Cavallo's Pizzeria, a tiny, cramped hellhole on 7th Avenue. Not cozy-cramped, but claustrophobic-cramped. I forgot to take a picture of it, but the logo is like, a naked babe riding a horse, which is totally weird. Although I guess 'cavallo' probably means 'horse' in Italiano, right? Whatever. This place was weird.

When I got our slice back to the table Caroline and Johnny had gotten for us in the very back of the room, Caroline was quick to point out the top of the red pepper shaker to me. It was a Gatorade bottle with the label torn off, and the top looked like it had had holes burned into it by a cigarette, or more likely, by a soldering iron. Either way, what it looked most like was some kind of orifice stricken with disease. Totally unappetizing. Caroline said this showed the "true American spirit," of bringing you bad quality things for as cheap as possible with no regard for anyone's health or well-being. There was some speculation at the table as to whether or not we would touch a dick that looked like that on the end, and we all agreed that maybe on Brad Pitt, but probably not even then.

The slice here was not especially good, although it did have it's moments. According to my notes, "this pizza is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, drenched in sugary sauce with poorly melted cheese." This shit tastes hella synthetic and the first half was way undercooked. The crust was the only saving grace. "This crust is okay," Johnny told me, "and I don't even like crust. I think it stems from back when I was an oogle and would eat the pizza bones out of the trash all the time."

This reminded me of a time some years ago where I was sitting with my good friend Matthew from Chattanooga, TN, waiting on Bedford Avenue for a bus to come and take him back somewhere before I road my bike home. We had been sitting around at the water drinking 40s and while waiting for the bus, stopped by Anna Maria's on Bedford to scrounge some half eaten slices out of the garbage can. We each got enough to eat to whet our appetites, but no more, and sat down, sort of dejected, at the bus stop. And there we saw it, like a shiny beacon of awesome nourishment, some miscellaneous frat boy was passed out on the steps of the bank with a pizza box in his lap. We crept over as stealthily as possible and, with the tips of our fingers like we were playing pick up sticks, we daintily opened the top of the box... and what valiant deeds we had committed I know not, but in that golden dawn we discovered an Entire Untouched Pizza! Thank the Great Pizzaola for her benevolence!

Once again, with ninja-like dexterity, we removed the box from the slumbering giant's lap. He shifted... he snored... but did he awaken? No. We sat on the steps next to him and ate that whole pie as the sun came up. And when we finished we threw the crusts back in the box, because we'd already probably eaten a whole pie worth of crusts from the trash, and we once again delicately placed the box back into our new friend's lap. Almost immediately afterwards the bus came and spirited Matthew away, and I road my bike the long way home, dreaming deliriously of our benefactor making his way back home with such a story, "dude, Bro, I totally went out to Brooklyn last night, right? And like, I was totally at this crazy bar and got so drunk. Dude it was crazy. All the chicks had tattoos. And bro, I got so wasted, I bought a whole pizza and I ate the whole thing and I passed out on the sidewalk with the box in my lap, bro! And I fucking woke up, and I was STILL HUNGRY, dog! How crazy is that shit?!"

Rating:

Cavallo's - $2.75

324 7th Ave (28th & 29th)

New York, NY 10001