Hot & Crusty: "I think this pizzeria is named after my friend DPG."

Last week I had the pleasure of going out and eating pizza with my good friends Matthew Hamilton and Noah Mayers. You may remember Noah from almost exactly a year ago when we went pizza eating after working as puppeteers at the 33rd Three Kings Day Parade at Museo Del Barrio. We actually went again this year and I will post a rare photo of us. I may take it down soon, to maintain my anonymity:

That's me in the green with the fruit and twig crown and Noah in the blue with the white beard. Photo from Harlem Bespoke.

Anyway, this is not about me and Noah, because I've already introduced him last year. He is awesome and my close friend. Now is the time for me to introduce one of my best friends, Matthew Goddamn Hamilton of Chattanooga, TN. Me and Matthew met on Sept. 12, 2011 on a rooftop in Crown Heights, both kind of freaking out a little, and we've been best friends ever since. I really respect and appreciate him for a lot of reasons and maybe I'll get into them in some more detail in subsequent posts. For now, it's time to talk about pizza.

 

 Our first stop was Hot & Crusty, an international oogle tourist attraction! Every summer throngs of young crusts head to New York City to nod out in Tompkins Square Park and take goofy pictures standing in front of the Hot & Crusty sign, to post on their Friendster profiles, although I can't think of a single oogle friend who has actually gone inside there. But maybe they should! The pizza here is absolutely unoffensively, middle-of-the-road mediocre, but they have a deal where you get two slices and a soda for $2.99! You can spange that in like, an hour! Go forth, young punks, when you are broke and can't find anything decent to dumpster, and get thee a hot slice!

Like I said up there, this slice is totally mediocre. Cheap ingredients, too salty, and not cooked enough, it was still totally unoffensive. One slice costs $2.75 and that is a total scam, but two and a soda for $2.99 is the deal of the century. So don't go here if you like pizza but do go here if you are broke and hungry.

Rating:

Hot & Crusty - $2.75 (2 & a soda for $2.99)

400 E 14th St (@ 1st Ave)

New York, NY 10009

Viva Herbal Pizzeria: "'Healthy Pizza' sucks."

Viva Herbal Pizzeria is the pits. There's not much really to say about it except that I knew it was gonna be bad as soon as I saw the words "Natural Pizzeria" on the awning. They sell a bunch of buttons and t-shirts about being vegan with corny puns that I've been wavering on whether or not I appreciate or loather since I was like, 12. I think that pentagram made of fork "I Worship Seitan" shirt is kind of cool, and I like how brash it is to wear a button that says "Fuckin' VEGAN" (be proud, homie!), but I feel like a lot of animal rights/pro-vegan propaganda in the past few years is tied to this really weird dialogue about promoting body shame (predominantly among women) and is kind of weirdly heteronormative for a purportedly progressive movement. If you don't know what I'm talking about then check out any PETA campaign from the last 5 years and you will see someone trying to make you feel guilty for being fat. Their most recent "Be Proud of Your Body Scan - GO VEGAN" campaign with the x-ray picture of a headless bikini babe is so disgusting on so many levels! And the fact that it's a major part of this movement that is ostensibly about compassion and the betterment of the whole Earth is just mind-blowingly disappointing. Not that PETA is by any means representative of all vegans. I am just digressing because there's nothing much to say about Viva Herbal.

This pizza sucks. Lumpy cheese, asphalt-textured cornmeal on the botton, crumbling crush. For some reason whenever I eat crust this texture I think about that scene in Gravity's Rainbow right at the beginning (because I've never gotten more than 50 pages in, let's be honest here), where those two dudes are walking through that deteriorating building looking for a dog or something, and then that makes me think of the Bombing of Dresden. This pizza reminds me of War Atrocities! Do I need to say much more than that? It is also worth noting that the cheese and sauce both contain Anti-Flavor, in that when you eat this slice it tastes like less than nothing. It tastes like absence. I'm sure their healthy slices are good.

I think this place should keep the name Viva Herbal, hang up a bunch of Take Me To Your Dealer posters and like, Pink Floyd tapestries, and make all their employees grow a soul patch and wear a drug rug as part of the dress code. Then they should start selling "handblown glass," flavored tobacco, and zippos. And then they should start doing tattoos and piercings in the back. And then they should STOP MAKING PIZZA FOREVER.

Rating:

Viva Herbal Pizzeria - $2.40

179 2nd Ave (11th & 12th)

New York, NY 10003

Artichoke: "Here we go again."

Artichoke. The last time I reviewed Artichoke, it was a shitshow, I got into an argument with strangers, and someone gave me $100. Lesson learned. Always antagonize yuppies. They might pay me for the service of rubbing some of my percieved authenticity off on them! Little do they know this is all a shtick and I'm actually a 32 year old woman from Augusta getting my doctorate in Comp. Lit. at the CUNY Grad Center and Slice Harvester is an elaborate performance piece! False authenticity abounds, beware.

Reading a little bit about Artichoke, I accidentally meandered over to my least favorite website, where I found the worst food writing I've ever seen in my life, care of a Chris H:

A sordid affair. Like an impish ex who's only reason for existence is to cause malady and a moment of joy in a moment of impetuous inebriation, Artichoke is there.
It is worth the inevitable wait and chaotic service for what is easily the best margherita slice in the city. Perfectly balanced flavors of tomatoes, cheese and basil sits a top of cracker crisp crust.
Fresh from the oven, it's far too easy to indulge too hastily and vehemently in a booze fueled haze.
Upon waking, you'll notice a burning sensation from the previous night's piping hot tomato sauce or your fling's prior iniquity.*
* Purely fictional. **
** There's a cream for that anyway.

What a d-bag! "An impish ex... impetuous inebriation... cracker crisp crust... [dismissive STI joke]" This guy is a like the Tom Robbins of Yalp.com. You can just smell how delighted with himself this motherfucker was when he wrote that. I can just see him now, sitting at his Macbook, typing the last '.' with a lone, pointed index finger, kicking his feet up onto his desk crossed at the ankle, with his hands behind his head and thinking, "this review is gonna get me so much pussy."

If I ever start taking myself that serious, someone please call me out. And if I am unreceptive, just cut out my tongue and cut off my fingers so I can never speak or type again. Please, don't just do it for me, do it for the world. Maybe I just hate Chris H because I fear I may become him?

As you may remember, the last time I ate at Artichoke like, two weeks ago, I got their margherita slice, and they only have two kinds of pizza, so I decided to try their famous artichoke slice this time. Before I talk about that, I'd like to briefly revisit my thoughts on their margherita. I'm pretty sure last time I said it was too expensive at $4, but I've been rethinking that. I think it's fairly priced. That thing is HUGE. And delicious. The ingredients are such good quality and it is totally awesome. It's not a New York slice, but good nevertheless. And priced fairly.

But having now eaten the Artichoke slice, I definitely don't see what the hype is about this place. Me and John both felt a very intense attraction-repulsion to this piece of food. It was totally disgusting, but I was drawn to it. Let me describe this slice for anyone who's never had it: Puck-like and enchanting, the pie at Artichoke-Basille's is both a beguiling coquette and mischeivous trickster. The perfect union of the demure and aggressive, the solar and lunar, the masculine and feminine. The crust is thick and firm, stoic and unmoving as the mountains. But atop this strong base rest the cheese and artichoke sauce, supple and yielding as an unblemished virgin, erogenous and engaging as.... FUCK. Sorry. That's my warning. Next time you guys get to start taking off my fingers.

This slice was so rich it made me and John sick. But we couldn't stop eating it! We could feel it hardening our arteries and clogging up our prematurely old-mannish bowels (you know the famous Woody Guthrie addage "hard livin' and hard travelin' makes for hard stools"). This is like if someone flattened out a bread bowl and poured too-thick soup on top of it. There had to be like, a gallon of heavy cream on our slice. I don't like this. And it made both of us feel nauseated. I can't even imagine what kind of sicko eats an entire one of these things by themself.

Rating:

n/a

Artichoke - $4.50

328 E 14th St (1st & 2nd)

New York, NY 10003

Pizza Place: "NoooOOoOoOOOooOOOOOOOoOOooooOOooooOOoo!!!!!!"

The font on the awning of Pizza Place reminds me of the kind of old sci-fi and pulp paperbacks my friend Cullen reads or Mike Hunchback posts on the Freedom School Records blog. It makes me think of digging through crates of books on the street, in used bookstores or in my parents basement looking for anything with a cool cover. It makes me think of reading my first Sam Delany and P.K. Dick novels, which were totally galvanizing moments in my life.

Sadly the pizza here doesn't remind me of anything good at all. Me and John each took a bite and looked at each other and gave eyes that were like, "eh, it ain't so bad and it's cheap to boot!" And then we both swallowed our respective bites and were both hit with the aftertaste and all of a sudden it was like that homophobic scene in Ace Ventura Pet Detective when he's scratching at his tongue and crying in the shower because he kissed a dude. We each tried a bite of the crust which was subpar and then John just took the slice and threw it out into traffic. It slapped on to the front of a cop car and I said, "FUCK YOU, PIG!" and we put on our rollerblades and took off! There were some crusties busking the Benny Hill Theme song on Astor Place and we had a really cool chase in circles around the cube where first the cop chased us and then we chased the cop and then John was wearing the cop's hat and the cop was wearing John's jacket and then we were sitting on top of the cube and the cop was just scratching his head and then we were alyl mysteriously running around in heart-print boxers until we finally ran East to Tompkins Square Park where we posed as picnicing yuppies and the cops lost us.

Rating:


Pizza Place - $1.50
226 E 14th (2nd & 3rd)
New York, NY 10003

New Amici: "I can't believe I've never gone inside this place!"

I have walked by New Amici probably thousands of times in the past ten or so years and I've never gone inside. Why? I don't know! It looks fine, it smells great. I guess I just always thought the awning was stupid. Whatever. Anyway, as it turns out, this place has a pretty good slice!

They cut it in half for me without my asking, which was very polite and I totally appreciated, even though I don't want my slice cut in half ever. It was a nice gesture nonetheless and I appreciated it. Anyway, this slice had good ratios, the cheese was of good enough quality, and the sauce was not especially noticable, but not offensive either. And the crust, it was really good! It was fluffy on the inside, crunchy on the outside, not too dense and had a perfect amount of salt. Which is in opposition to the rest of the slice which was, I must admit, a touch too salty. Over all, I liked this and I will certainly make a habit of stopping in here now and again when I come to the city to get discount brie from the East Village Cheese Shop.

Rating:

New Amici - $2.50

88 3rd Ave (12th & 13th)

New York, NY 10003

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