Vic's Pizza: "We are entering the city's Picture Perfect Pizza Parlor district."

Last week I went out eating pizza with my friends Meredith, who is a famous pizza pal, T-Bone, the singer of a notorious local band, and my friend Logan a true American weirdo who I have met over and over again all over the country.

Our first stop was Vic's Pizza on Essex. It's not too much to look at from the outside, but once you get in there's great music playing and a bevy of wonderful hand drawn signs.

There was also a Ms Pacman machine that T-Bone was quick to play.

This place is totally adorable and I'd want to be here for hours if the food was any good! Sadly, the pizza was a fucking bummer.

This base of this slice was the texture of cardboard. It seemed like that might be its only flaw for the first few seconds of the first bite, but then the flavor of the sauce set in. It was like, this slow motion ketchup tidal wave in my mouth. The time it took to set in makes me think of that Heinz commercial with Joey from Friends where he pours the ketchup off the tenement roof and then winks at a babe after he catches it on his hotdog. Except instead of a hotdog stand on that sidewalk imagine you, laying prone on the ground, bound by your wrists and ankles as if to some kind of medieval torture device and then the ketchup just falls all over your face like water torture. Ugh. The crust was flavorless. The ratios were all wrong. T-Bone was busy playing Ms. Pacman, but he walked over at one point, took a bite and said, "too soft and gooey inside. Not very tasty. I don't like it."

Rating:


Vic's Pizza - $2.25
51 Essex St (Grand & Hester)
New York, NY 10002

Contributor Comix Friday!

I had planned to write a review today during the slow early evening hours at the diner, but I left my pizza journal at home. However, I present to you instead, a comic, by my good friend and fellow pizza lover, Gabby Schulz, known to some by his nomme de plume, Ken Dahl. Gabby makes awesome comics and writes wry, social commentary on his website. He has a few books out and one of my favorite twitter feeds.

I asked him to draw a comic for the most recent issue of Slice Harvester Quarterly (ordering instructions here), and he threw this together for me in like, 5 minutes, which is super amazing to me because I can't draw very well.

If you're somehow unfamiliar with the ubiquitous Shoddily Modified Spice Shaker, it is discussed in depth here.

Reviews will be back on Monday. Until then, go read about why the world is a shitty, unforgiving place on Gabby's blog.

Rudy's Pizza & Restaurant: "Don't you be so cruel and feckless."

Rudy's Pizza & Restaurant is a nice looking place, don't get me wrong, and the staff are nice, but it is a total poser tourist trap. Maybe maybe maybe maybe MAYBE the pastas and stuff are good, but the pizza here is bogus and for some reason, even though the slice ended up being $2.50, I just felt like I was about to get ripped off. Like when you visit another country and you go to a restaurant that looks like it's cute and cheap and then it turns out that it's expensive and not very good and then you realize it doesn't even look cute and cheap and then you feel like a dickhead. Not that this place WAS that, it just reminded me of that.

I shouldn't have to say much about this slice if you are looking at the same picture as me. It was so hot it burned my mouth but the cheese still hadn't melted all the way, which means it is made of some foreign substance other than dairy. It was totally bland and WAY too salty at the same time. The sauce was like, this dry, flavorless paste and there was no grease to speak of so I felt like I was eating the desert. The crust was doughy and disgusting. This shit was just no good. Don't bother.

Rating:


Rudy's Pizza & Restaurant - $2.50
174 Hester St (Mott & Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012

Sal's Pizza Pasta Cafe: "I don't know how I feel about this place, but the pizza is good."

Sal's Pizza Pasta Cafe has a great looking exterior. It's really a beautiful place, and you can tell there is a lot of love and devotion here. And a lot of care. Upon walking inside, the place is warm and homey. It feels good in there, and it feels like the people care. Then me and Martin noticed this newspaper clipping pasted to the wall:

 

It's an article about famous national villain George W Bush visiting New York City in the wake of September 11th, and it contains the following circled portion:

Among those who strongly felt Bush ought to come back to New York more regularly were the owners of Sal's pizza shop on Broome Street, which prepared the firehouse luncheon.


"If he came back a couple more times it would do wonders for the city," said Pete Arnone, a relative of the owners and the guy who keeps the books at Sal's. "His presence is saying, 'It's safe. We need to stimulate business.' If he starts coming back then a lot of other people will start coming back."

Business at Sal's, which dropped 70 percent in the week after the attacks, was back to its normal level yesterday, Arnone said.

The man who made the five presidential pizzas yesterday was Francesco Triolo. "An FBI agent was watching me the whole time I was doing it," he said, still beaming with pride later in the day. "He was a very nice guy, but he didn't let his eyes off for a minute. It was the first time I made pizzas under surveillance."

 And then we looked around and noticed that the same article was photocopied and posted over every single table!

I don't really like that too much, to be honest. When I think of George Bush and pizza, I prefer the guy who ran into a pizza place and called him a "murderous, Zionist piece of shit," a few years ago. (Presuming, of course, that that guy wasn't an anti-Semite. Not that everyone who thinks a Zionist political stance is problematic is anti-Semitic, but the lines are blurry enough that I felt the need to disclaim.) There is something that totally unsettled me and made me feel a little bit like I was supping with the enemy or whatever.

But then I was just like, "you know, fuck it." Like, the other day I noticed a sign at my mailbox place that said, "TEA: TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY" and that shit is patently stupid, but I'm not gonna stop getting my mail there and I'm not going to stop thinking that the couple who run the place are nice people just because they disagree with me. I think this is an easy thing that most people grasp when they are really young, that you can disagree with people about something but they can still be okay people. But I have been REALLY PUNK for a long time, and as many people know, punx are a small and insular culture who are wary of outsiders, which is why so many of them feel comfortable living in Hassidic neighborhoods.

I can say with 100% honesty, that growing up in the punk scene and investing my whole self in it, at the expense of everything else in my life, at a very young age, netted me so many positive experiences, a loving and supportive community, and a self of self-assurance in my abilities that many people I know who didn't come out of punk rock lack. That shit is awesome! I think it also led me to make a ton of really poor decisions and to believe in a bunch of total crap because it seemed cool. Remember CrimethINC? That shit is fucked on so many levels!

Ugh, anyway, I guess my point is that even though this place had newspaper articles that mentioned GW Bush in it, it didn't bother me that much, even though I felt like it should bother me. Whatever, maybe I will elaborate on this another time, it's late.

This slice had the same audible crunch of Ray's, without any of the disappointment. They use quality ingredients here at Sal's, and they know how to make a good slice. Apparently this place has been here under the same ownership since the late 70s, so maybe they still make pizza with care and skill like they used to. There was plenty of grease and great ratios. The bottom had this burnt flavor that requires the most delicate skill to achieve and the crust tasted delicious and had an excellent texture. All in all, despite my possible political indignation, this was a great slice and maybe the last decent pizzeria in Little Italy.

Rating:


Sal's - $2.50
369 Broome St (Elizabeth & Mott)
New York, NY 10012

Pomodoro Restaurant & Pizzeria: "Glory days, ain't comin' back."

Pomodoro Restaurant & Pizzeria is a worthless shithole. Walking into this place is like walking into some shitty college sports bar in New Brunswick, NJ. Sometimes when you play a show in New Brunswick they take you to these places to eat before the show and you are surrounded by like, The Rape Culture in the form of the kind of frat guys that Dead Milkmen/Dead Kennedys songs are about. And you start wondering what the hell they are thinking living in this shit city. But then the show happens and New Brunswick is like, the most fun place in the Northeast to play a basement show besides Worcester and you realize that the price you have to to have these houses and excited kids and fun shows is that you have to live in the epicenter of the Patriarchy. And then you start thinking that maybe there's a thing about awesome punk scenes can only happen when they are an antagonist to like, some dominant shitty culture. Which is the root of the ultimately flawed and unsustainable nature of punk as a utopian culture. Because like, there is this thing that happens when there isn't a shitty college frat culture or like, lame rednecks or an oppressive police force where punk scenes turn into garage rock scenes, which are just punk scenes with none of the good politics. Whatever, this place was a bummer, do you get that?

This slice had a good crunch and that's it. The sauce tasted like Elio's. The cheese was crap. There was no grease. The slice wasn't hot enough. The crust was bland. My notes say, "tastes gross. I'm disgusted." Martin said, "it seems kind of dusty." And he's right. This is like a ghost town in your mouth. There is a barren emptiness in the spectrum of flavors from this slice. Holy crap, what a waste of time.

Rating:


Pomodoro Restaurant & Pizzeria - $2.85
51 Spring St (Mulberry & Lafayette)
New York, NY 10012

Ray's Pizza: "This is the actual original Ray's!"

After the total disaster that was Lombardi's, me and Marty were ready for all of the worst possible outcomes of eating at another "historic pizza parlor." This time we were at Ray's Pizza, which is the oldest pizzeria bearing that moniker, and is also the most famous. So really, this place should be called Famous Original Ray's and the entire FOR chain should change their name to Nondescript Replicant Ray's.

This place is kind of dire. There is no music, which can be a good thing at times, but you can hear a certain amount of hopelessness in the clanking of metal and the slicing of pies. The employees looked bummed. Martin had this to say, "I could picture a nice hangover here. Like if you woke up in this neighborhood for some reason and came for a slice here. The desperation in the place could match the desperation in your body and mind."

This slice was pretty alright, though! When I folded it, it made a beautiful and discernible crunch. However, somehow despite the perfect auditory signifiers of this slice's texture, it was a little bit too chewy anyway. The sauce was really watery, but delicious, and the cheese was great quality even if there was a little too much of it. Despite these qualms, which were small, and which I only listed for the sake of full transparency, this was a good slice! What can I say? I'd eat here again.

Rating:


Ray's Pizza - $2.65
27 Prince St (Elizabeth & Mott)
New York, NY 10012