Pastafina.com Pizza Cafe: "This is the pizza they serve in hell."

A confluence of a bunch of shit going on, plus my computer only half working led to my not being able to update Slice Harvester for three days. That happens occasionally and you guys are used to it, so I'm not killing myself over it, but it did make ME realize something. I also am pretty sure I haven't spoken to anyone in my family in a few days either, so I wonder how many days I'd have to go without updating or talking to my mom (I LOVE YOU MOM!) for her to get worried and call me to see if I'm alive. I don't plan to find out, but it definitely made me feel like I have a lot more privacy and space than I thought.


Pastfina.com Pizza Cafe is a weird place with horrible food. The name was familiar to me, and I couldn't remember why, but it turns out I ate there with zombie William Blake. As you may recall from that entry, zombie William Blake had been portending doom all day and it turned out he was talking about Pastafina the whole entire time. Anyway, while that place is simply called "Pastafina" and this place seems to be called "Pastafina.com", they share a website, which leads me to believe they are related. Also the fact that eating the food in either location is a terrible and harrowing experience leads me to believe that they are related as well.

This place, though it was terrible, was not without it's charms. To start, it is called Pastafina.com, and do you know what that makes me think of? Trick Daddy, the name whose second record, www.thug.com, is also the name of his website. The other charming occurrence involved my interaction with the two employees. I walked up to the counter and ordered a regular slice. There were two guys back there, and one put my slice in while the other just looked at me. Then he was all, "you speak Spanish?"
And there was something in his voice that made me look at him quizzically and say, "no," instead of shrugging my shoulders, making a pinching gesture and saying "un poquito" like I usually do.
And it paid off because no sooner had I finished saying "no habla Espaniol" en Englais, the guy putting my pizza in the oven turned to me, looked dead in my eyes and said, "chinga tu madre."
Well, I looked wide eyed and said, "well, whatever does that mean?"
And his buddy goes, "He say's 'enjoy your slice.' That'll be $2.50." !!!!!
Those guys were sassy and I like that, but Pastafina.com still had shitty pizza.


Where do I begin? This slice was the pits. It tasted HORRIBLE. I think aside from wanting me to fuck my mother these dudes were also trying to poison me. As soon as I got to the table, Jesse Jane said, "I don't like slices that look like that." Becca said, "it smells like Chef Boyardee." I folded it up and was ready to accept it with arms wide open, until I took my first bite. Yowza was this horrible pizza. It tasted like rotting sour things. Dead things. There was something other worldly about it and not in that way where like, sometimes some of my little weird friends are aloof and effervescent and seem to just flit about on a breeze and bring magic feelings and ~good vibez~ everywhere they go and I'll be like, "David is so otherworldly." No this is otherworldly like from a Sandman comic where it means it came from hell. At a certain point we started mushing the folded slice with our fingers and the cheese was bubbling out and it looked like something from a David Cronenburg movie. It was so sick. Sick like shitting out of your mouth, not sick like jumping out of a hot air balloon on a snowboard. I took a video of it on my cellphone that I was so excited to make into the first ever Slice Harvester Video Supplement, but I can't get it off the stupid phone.


After we were done mushing the pizza around, I opened it up and the most horrifying smell wafted up. It was seriously one of the worst smells I've ever been exposed to In My Life and I have been waist deep in garbage more times than I care to recall. Anyway, while we did ultimately almost finish this horrible thing out of masochism and curiosity, it was really, hands down one of the worst slices I've ever had in my life. Yuck.

Rating:


Pastafina.com Pizza Cafe - $2.50
712 3rd Ave
New York, NY 10017

Pastafina: "Third time's the charm? Kind of, I guess"

On the way over to Pastafina, Clancy and I met up with my friend Mike Taylor, to accompany us for the rest of the day's slices. I met Mike in Providence at Mikey Hotsauce and Caroline's house and then the next time I was in town he tattooed a raincloud on my belly with a banner around it that says, "Sooner Or Later It All Gets Real." Laying in his bedroom looking at his tapes against the wall I remember being really excited that he had a Mukilteo Faeries demo, because that Special Rites 7" was a really defining record for me as a kid. Afterwards I got a HORRIBLE slice on Broadway in Providence, and we sat in Mike's backyard where we drank 40s and he showed me his brick oven. At this point Slice Harvester wasn't even a twinkle in it's daddy's eye, so the pizza oriented aspects of our hangout were purely coincidental.

Mike lives in Brooklyn now, and he is an art handler and makes really rad comics. He is a lover of pizza, (dare I say a pizza obsessive?), so his accompanying me on a pizza mission was practically written in the stars. It was meant to be. When I told Clancy that Mike was meeting us for pizza, Clancy said, "don't tell him about the Palatka shirts I printed when I was in high school." Don't worry Clancy, your secret is safe with me.


You may remember my prior trips to the other two Pastafina locations, first with famous erotic poet Jake Birkenstock ("when I left this place, after Blake and I went our separate ways, I totally barfed all over the sidewalk"), and then with Jesse Jane and her friend Rebecca ("while we did ultimately almost finish this horrible thing out of masochism and curiosity, it was really, hands down one of the worst slices I've ever had in my life"). In short, those were two of the most atrocious slices of pizza I've ever eaten in my life. Each received a 1 slice rating, although I should probably downgrade them to a half or a zero, as I was presumably being too kind.


The slice I had with Mike and Clancy was the best Pastafina slice to date and it was still totally fucking wretched. It was gooey and flavorless. Like, it literally tasted like nothing and had the most appalling texture I've ever experienced. Mike said, "this pizza has an agnostic front. Like, you bite into the hard crust and then it's just gooey and unrecognizable." This is the dregs. Total crap. I always say that I don't mind giving out bad reviews because I don't think that they'll ever really substantially affect someone's business because people will always eat shitty slices out of convenience. But if part of Slice Harvester's last legacy is that a help shut down these three abominable hell holes masquerading as eateries, I will be proud, and I'll be able to know at the end of my life, whether the sum total of all my actions has been good or bad, I at least did one tangible thing to aid the flailing corpse of humanity in its last days.

Rating:


Pastafina - $2.50
388 3rd Ave (27th & 28th)
New York, NY 10016

Pastafina: "Pastafina Pizza is made in San Antonio, with fresh vegetables and spices, by people who know what Pastafina Pizza should taste like."

I ran into a friend of mine on the train yesterday, and we inevitably talked about Slice Harvester, as I was on my way to eat pizza with my close friend Wesley Davis. Amongst his total and abject honesty (buddy: how many slices have you eaten anyway? me: probably around 200. buddy: I'm disguh... you disgust me.) he leveled a harsh criticism. Quoth (paraphrasingly), "Is the Blake you're talking about this week Blake Schwarzenbach? People will probably care about that and it may behoove you to harp on it a little more." As an answer to his ridiculous question, I guess I should specify that, no, when I refer to "Blake" in these entries I'm not referring to Blake Schwarzenbach. I'm referring to William Blake, who's corpse I dug up and reanimated.


The entire afternoon walking around, Blake was pontificating and prophesying totally wild impending doom. I figured it was just remnants from all the time he spent hanging around Milton coupled with the culture shock of being reanimated into New York City, 2010. But it turns out he was just talking about Pastafina.


The slice here tasted like jarred salsa. Seriously. I kept thinking of those Pace Chunky Salsa commercials from my youth and a chorus of cowboys in my head shouted "NEW YORK CITY?!?!" every time I took a bite. At some point during the eating of this slice Blake's jaw finally rotted off and he was unable to provide me with a verbal critique, but he did draw me a picture of how eating this slice made him feel:


It also bears noting that when I left this place, after Blake and I went our separate ways, I totally barfed all over the sidewalk.

Rating:


Pastafina - $2.50
876 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10065

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Tonight I will be doing a very short reading at a Rock Concert at Shea Stadium featuring many old friends of mine's wonderful bands and projects. The show starts at 8pm, and it probably costs like, $5-7, I would imagine? All the bands are great, so you should totally come check it out. Shea Stadium is located at 20 Meadows Street, Brooklyn NY 11206. L train to Grand, I think, though I'll ride my bike there because I'm not a poser.

Cafe Amore's Restaurant: "When the smell hits your nose and you think the dead rose that's Amore"

Cafe Amore is a small local chain with three restaurants that serves giant slice of shitty pizza. For a minute I was thinking it was the worst smelling pizzeria in the city, but I actually have a feeling another small local chain, Pastafina, might take that prize home. These places have even less character than the other small local chain, Abitino's, which is a total pretender and chock full of false authenticity, but they at least have some kind of interior design motif. Cafe Amore just has a shelf of decorative wine glasses.

"For display only"

Otherwise, there are pretty much bare walls and formica table tops. I don't know, I don't mind simplicity but this place is just dreary and so is the pizza.

This slice had nothing going for it. No personality. Aminah said it has "the lingering aftertaste of old people," which she admitted she "kind of liked." But Aminah likes disgusting things! Look at her art. She is intrigued by the sick side of life. And while I dabble in the disturbed, my intrigue with the occult doesn't extend to Hellishly Bad Pizza.



Notice the total lack of structural integrity on this slice. When folded the front flops forward like a huge flaccid dong, flopping around under it's weight at the whims of gravity. Looking at it from the front, it creates what I call The Grease Tunnel, and slightly resembles a quivering and trepidatious anus, poised to spray diarrhea everywhere after having received an enema at the hands of the Pretty Hate Machine himself, Trent Reznor.

Did I spoil your appetite? Does thinking about Trent Reznor giving a slice of pizza an enema and then the pizza shooting greasy, liquid shit all over Marilyn Manson make you feel anything but hungry? Good. Because I don't want you to associate Cafe Amore with food. I want you to associate with gross things, vile things. This is Pavlovian training. Stay away from this place!

Rating:


Cafe Amore Restaurant - $2.75
147 Chambers St (Hudson & West Broadway)
New York, NY 10007

Georgio's: "Plastic surgery disasters."

By the time we arrived at Georgio's, I think Jen Shag and I had run out of expectations, though we hadn't run out of hope. Upon walking into the establishment, we were confronted with the ambiance of a Cafe Amore and the smell of a Pastafina. In short, what little hope we had left was squandered. I'm not exactly sure how to best tie it together, but everything about this place seemed to be summed up in the 4000" flatscreen on the wall playing some "Deadly Bar Fight" reality courtroom show and the gaggle of lonesome fools watching it, slack-jawed and dead-eyed.

And if ever a piece of pizza could be described as "slack-jawed and dead-eyed," this is the slice. It vaguely approximates pizza in the way that weird overly tanned, overly plastic surgeried celebrities approximate humans, but a true New York slice it is not. The sauce tasted like the meatball sandwich in my Middle School cafeteria. Jen remarked that the cheese tasted like "they cooked the wrapper from the mozzarella onto the slice." There were distinct notes of burnt plastic and impending cancer. The crust had a shiny gloss to it, like the varnish on a hardwood floor or the paint job on a car. Everything about this slice was artificial. To be frank, it looked like Carrot Top's face. In summation, Jen said, "they should be paying us $2.50 to eat this slice." I think I'd probably like to be paid more than that, but I'll take what I can get in these trying economic times.

Rating:


Georgio's Pizzeria - $2.50
20 Beaver St (Broadway and Something Else)
New York, NY 10004