Fat Sal's: "Fat Sal's with a vengeance."

Fat Sal's has been haunting me since I went pizza eating with Phoebe Cates. It came back to rear its ugly, totally inconsistent, head when I met up with Kever OCP and Ernie a couple months ago. Once again, Fat Sal's provided a perplexing enigma. Actually, that is totally giving this boring place way more credence than it deserves. The mystery of the first Fat Sal's is undeniable, and the second was just wildly inconsistent, in that they served me one great slice and one totally horrible one. This Fat Sal's location basically split the difference in that they served me one totally mediocre slice.

Here's the thing, I was so caught up in hanging with Jonathan and discussing my history with Fat Sal's that I somehow forgot to photograph this slice. I know that is like The Ultimate Betrayal, but considering this is the first time in 300 pizzerias that I've done this I think I get a pass, okay? Besides, to make up for that I've offered some supplementary information about Philadelphia Pizza-Related Fast Food!

Anyway, Fat Sal's's slice is, first and foremost, a real slice of pizza, which is refreshing in Midtown where there seems to be nothing but crappy fake pizza served at weird cafeterias and delis. Despite the fact that this is actually authentic pizza, it's not very good. It has a decent texture throughout most of the slice, but the sauce is overall far too sweet and there is not enough of it, to boot, leaving the slice foul tasting and too dry. Quoth Jonathan: "I'm just not sold.

My ultimate assessment is that this slice might be worth it compared to the rest of the neighborhood, but on the spectrum of all pizza, it ranks pretty low. And speaking of the neighborhood, while we were eating this slice, Jonathan and I got to talking about how weird Hell's Kitchen can be and he reminded me of that time two years ago when those two dudes pushed their dead friend to the Pay-O-Matic in an office chair so that they could try and cash his Social Security check. And I figured I'd remind you, dear readers, these are the moments of total dementia that make this town great.

Rating:


Fat Sal's - $2.50
510 9th Ave (38th & 39th)
New York, NY 10018

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In other news, I recently had the pleasure of driving to Philly for an evening with Support New York so that we could have a meeting with Philly Stands Up. They were totally gracious hosts, cooked us an amazing meal and sat through a really intense 6 hour meeting about Heavy Shit and then brought us to a dance party. At the dance party, I ran into my old friend Justin Bender (whose new band is playing in Brooklyn on the 19th, I think!) who asked me if I had ever had the Pizza rolls at Peking Inn on previous trips to Philly. Though I have eaten the delicious General Tsao's Tofu from that place a million times, I never even knew they had pizza rolls, so I was intrigued. I bough two, one to eat in the store, and one to take home and disassemble.

Notice in the left picture, that this "Pizza Roll" looks just like an egg roll. Yet if you will look at the image to the right, you'll see that it is, in fact, full of pizza. Fresh pizza roll verdict: Delicious!

Fortified by the strength imbued by pizza-type foods, I was able to safely ferry the entire SNY collective back to Brooklyn in slightly over two hours. Upon arriving home I put my remaining pizza roll in the fridge and promptly forgot about it until yesterday. To the left we see the fresh out the fridge pizza roll, bisected. Note the totally weird "pizza paste" on the inside. So strange. To the right is our half-pizza roll, having been placed in the microwave for 45 seconds or so. Not that the pizza sludge becomes a delicious mixture of cheese and "sauce" when heated. Day old pizza roll verdict: Scrumptious!

Let's make it official: Slice Harvester is Pro-Pizza Roll!

Fat Sal's: "This place doesn't make a goddamn lick of sense."

Yesterday I promised readers a lengthy introduction to my friend Ernie. However, the more I've thought about it, the less I feel like I'm capable of describing him. Every anecdote I'd like to relay, every yarn I'd like to spin, is too simple, or two one-sided, or too essentializing. Or just simply not something I feel comfortable sharing, either for Ernie's confidentiality or my own. I will tell you this, though: Ernie is one of the three most magical people I know, he has ridden freight trains through more continents than I've been to, and when he is calm he is one of the most placid and soothing folks I've ever met, but when he is wild he will bring the devil right outta me.

Now, new readers may not know this, but a few months ago I had the pleasure of eating pizza with Famous American Babe of the 80s, Phoebe Cates. While wandering around with Phoebe, her really cool daughter Greta, and my good buddy Caroline Paquita, we all had the shared misfortune of eating at Fat Sal's UES establishment. It was among the worst pizza I've ever had in my life, so I was hesitant when Ernie, Kevers and I looked across 50th street after leaving Livejournal Pizza and saw a Fat Sal's looming ahead.


For some reason, although I was entirely cognizant of my prior experience at another of this small chain's locations, this Fat Sal's didn't fill me with dread. In fact, it just made me think of the fat Sal in my life. Maybe it was Ernie's mystical influence, or maybe it was the fact that I am in some crazy energy vortex lately where the whole world seems to be spiraling out of control with me at the epicenter, the fucking locus of all this seemingly anonymous but ultimately deliberate and graceful chaos, but I felt an instinct that we would get a decent slice here despite the crimes of history, and I was not wrong. Moral: trust your guts.


This slice was pretty impeccable. Ernie, who was pretty stuck on rating slices on a one to ten scale, gave this one an eight. (He gave the slice at LJ a five, by the way.) This slice lacked all the total weirdness of the other Fat Sal's. In fact, it was damn good. Great crunch, great textures, great taste. I was shocked, and I said so to my companions. Kevers remarked, "it's possible we got lucky, because I saw some of the other slices and they looked like they should be spinning around on a wire tray under a lightbulb at some Midwest Bowling Alley." I hoped Kev was wrong, but after we finished our first one, Ernie ordered two more slices and they were BAD! Too much cheese, too little time in the oven! Fuck! What is going on! Current verdict on Fat Sal's: INCONSISTENT!

Oh, and I doubt he reads this, but to the motherfucker who took up the whole table by himself and wanted to make me and Ernie and Kevers stand in a crowded pizza store even though there were three empty seats at the table where he was sitting and ample room: Sometimes you gotta share your table, ding dong! If you don't like it, move to fucking Alaska where everyone has personal space. This is New York City. I hope you trip on the subway steps and you don't hurt yourself but you land with your mouth in something nasty like some pee or vomit. And I hope you don't get sick from it, because I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but I hope it really grosses you out and ruins your day.

Fat Sal's - $2.50
730 10th Avenue
New York, NY 10019

Fat Sal's Pizza: "The Crackdown."

Longtime readers will recognize this awning from my three prior visits to a Fat Sal's location. To recap, the first time they tried to poison me, the second time they tried to confuse me and the third time they just settled into a comfortable groove of mediocrity, where they seem to have remained on this fourth visit. Ultimately, though, eating the pizza here, and especially compared to the other pizza in Chelsea, I realized that whether or not I like the pizza at Fat Sal's they are Making Pizza. Maybe the owners and pizzamen and customers of Fat Sal's just have different pizza standards. Or maybe they were once totally great, and that one perfect slice I had with Kever and Ernie was like those moments where you think Magneto is going to get it together and just accept that Professor X is right. Unless you are some hardline Vegan Reich dingus, in which case you probably always loved Magneto. One time at a party a million years ago I was talking to some starry-eyed young vegan anarchist and told him that my girlfriend and I were planning on having a baby so we could raise it like a veal calf and take pictures of it's mangled deformed body from being raised in a cage, to humanize the terrible cost of veal to the square world so they'd finally understand what it was like and homeboy WAS TOTALLY INTO IT. I think veal is majorly lame and I don't eat it, but really? If there's anything the Slice Harvester does not endorse it is genuine zealotry.

Anyway, this slice was pretty bad. One good thing that came out of it, though, is that Tonie called the crust "the rim" and that was pretty cool. Here is the rundown. Totally dry, but that meant it had a good crunch, at least. The cheese was cheapo and there was not enough sauce, but you could tell this was real pizza made by a real pizzaman. Nothing to right home about, obviously, but we finished it and it wasn't THAT BAD. Also, a plus was that the grease wasn't the same viscosity as semi-dry candle wax.

Rating:


Fat Sal's - $2.50
217 W 14th St
New York, NY 10011

Fat Sal's: "THIS IS A PIZZA TRAVESTY!"

Fat Sal's is a nice looking place. "Nice looking" is actually probably the least apt phrase for it, to be honest. What I mean is that I'm comfortable with it, it's kind of a shithole but not super filthy and it has enough character to satisfy me. That said, they are slinging some horrifying pizza in this joint.


The slice, it doesn't look so bad. In fact, for most of the time we were eating it, I was fairly okay with it. The cheese tasted decent, the dough was good. Phoebe thought it had the texture of a pizza that was ordered at the beginning of a children's birthday party but then consumed at the end, luke warm, when it had been sitting in the box for a few hours, and Caroline pointed out that the sauce tasted kind of like Shrimp Ramen.

All of this was fine. Not a good slice, but totally inoffensive. And then I absentmindedly dipped my finger into a small puddle of grease on my plate and it DENTED and retained a relief of my fingerprint. It kind of felt like I was pressing my finger into half congealed candelwax, like the kind on your body when you're at the dentist and she lights a candle and drips it onto your thighs. Anyway, I showed everyone else what was going on and they were appalled. One by one, Caroline, Greta and Phoebe each dipped their finger into a small puddle of grease on their plates and drew it back aghast. "This is happening inside our bodies," I said, very gravely, "we're all gonna die."
"Wait a minute," Phoebe chimed in, "it's the wax paper that slice came on!" And we all breathed a sigh of relief.
But Caroline was skeptical. "I don't know, I've had a lot of pizza on wax paper before and I've never seen anything like this in my life."
I noticed a small grease bit on my paper plate and trepidatiously reached my hand forward to touch it, hoping it was regular liquid grease. But sure enough, I mushed my finger into it and came away with a dry finger, and a dented pile on my plate. "It's not the wax paper," I reported.
I was starting to feel like I was in that movie The Stuff.

Phoebe was unsatisfied with our guessing game and decided to go get some answers. She strode confidently over to the counter while Greta and Caroline and I discussed what she could possibly be doing. She came back a few minutes later smirking to herself. "I went over to the counter and I said to the guy, 'I just really liked the slice here, do you think I could take a look at where you guys make it?' And he took me back behind the counter and there were just tubs and tubs of lard. I bet that's what it is, lard." We were all relieved we hadn't ingested a brain-eating, alien food substance, but we still weren't happy with our experience. Upon leaving Greta pointed out this sign that was an unintentional warning:

Look at the texture of the cheese on that clip art pizza, it's so foreboding, like it's trying to warn us about the horrors that await within Fat Sal's.

Rating:


Fat Sal's Pizza - $2.50
1603 2nd Ave
New York, NY 10028

Gino's: "What a fucking pleasure."

Our hearts were heavy with sadness and lard as the four of us slunk away from the horrors of Fat Sal's. We turned onto 83rd cautiously, like abused animals who had finally fled our masters, terrified that our relationship with every pizzeria would be as painful as the one we'd had previously. Little did we know, fate was bringing us to the warm, cradling embrace of Gino's.


Here's something Gino's has that isn't mandatory, but is appreciated: gobs of fucking class. And class without pomp or ritz, at that. You walk into Gino's, it looks nice, there's wine, they're playing some Old Blue Eyes, it's not a shithole. But everything isn't shiny and you're not afraid to speak above a whisper. There's this picture of my Great Uncle Joe and my Grandpa Tom that I have hanging on my wall that was taken, I wanna say in the 30's, my mother can correct me. They're standing on Astoria Blvd, dressed to the nines in 3 piece suits and top coats, and they look like fucking mobsters or movie stars to me when they're actually just a couple of poor, Irish shmucks in Queens. But they look dignified and respectable, without looking like ostentatious fancy-pantses. (And we all know the Official Slice Harvester Stance on Fancy-Pantses) The inside of Gino's looks like how my grandfather and his brother are dressed in that picture. That's what I'm trying to say. This is classic New York City.


This slice. Crisp and charred on the bottom, cheesy on top, with a delicate sauce that you don't notice is there but would certainly miss if it were gone. Phoebe, who grew up on the UES, says that Gino's has been around forever and they have had a consistently good slice for as long as she's known the place. Pizzerias like this are what make Slice Harvesting worth it. I don't think I ever would've come here otherwise, as I have no cause to ever be in this neighborhood, but I will certainly make the trip back. There is a lot of love in Gino's pizza, years of practice, and you can taste it in the slice. I'd like to come back one night dressed like a champ and have a pretend-fancy dinner here. I bet their pastas are unbelievable, and the atmosphere alone is worth the trip.

Rating:


Gino's Pizza - $2.95
345 East 83rd Street
New York, NY 10028