A Few Brooklyn Pizza Joints, Mostly Worth Trying

NYC food circles were recently abuzz with the news that the price of a slice of Di Fara’s pizza had reached $5. That’s more than twice the standard street slice price of $2.25, itself the subject of recent inflation, what with the rising cost of flour and the continued rapaciousness of property managers. Founder and pizza-chef Domenico DeMarco explained it in the New York Times like this: “I use the top ingredients. Other pizzerias, I don’t think they use the top.” Yeah, right. Tell that to Sal and Carmine. Tell that to Anselmo. Tell that to… let me back up a second.

Down the block from me in Red Hook, $6 — only a buck more — buys a whole small pie at Anselmo’s Pizza (yeah, their website’s lame. What do you want? They make pizza, not code). That’s not some POS sneezy-freezy processed-corn pre-fab pie. That’s a handmade 10″ single-serve pizza, with the crust made from top-quality pizza flour (I know — I’ve peeked at the bags), sauced with an impeccable sauce. The cheese? Real buffalo mozzarella, imported from Italy. The oven? A grandfathered-in coal-burner, from 1953, that takes one pie at a time, and cooks each in a minute and a half for a plain pie, slightly more for, say, sausage and artichokes. (Yes, I timed it.) So what’s the difference? For starters, Anselmo’s doesn’t do slices. Neither do many of the more serious pizza joints in Italy and New York alike. You could, I suppose, argue that this is Brooklyn, and it doesn’t matter what other pizza places in Italy do — the question is what real pizza places in Brooklyn do. Well, I can answer that, too. The realest Brooklyn pizza place I know, House of Pizza and Calzones, where, for reasons unknown, they sometimes answer the phone, “Sal’s,” also happens to be a stone’s throw from my apartment: By “real,” I mean that the quality is consistently excellent, and that all the guys waiting at the counter work in construction, the MTA, or protection rackets, maybe all of the above (there’s a lot of potential for crossover). A recent renovation brought them a spacious back room for pizza eating, and even a back patio. The pizza has changed not a bit. Unlike Anselmo’s, it’s a slow-cooker, baked in a big Bari deck oven, that takes ten minutes or so to turn out one of the four or five pies they have going at any one time during rush hour. It’s ok. Not all pizzas have to cook in a 700-degree hydrocarbon-burner. The cheese and toppings are of excellent quality, and the crust is at once crisp on the bottom, and chewy in the middle, without succumbing to the moisture of the toppings. Price per slice? An industry-standard two bucks and change. I doubt the neighborhood would have it any other way. Try the Red Hook Special, topped with broccoli rabe and locally-made Italian sausage, redolent of fennel, $22 and worth every cent.

On my first date with Missy, we stopped by Lucali, only to find a line down the block. “Ya gotta get here at six o’clock,” offered some yobbo in a baseball cap. It was quarter past eight. Ok, so what are you still doing standing on the sidewalk, like you were waiting for a glimpse of a movie star… or… something.

Well, that’s it, isn’t it? Places like Lucali, Grimaldi’s, and Di Fara aren’t about the pizza anymore. Maybe for the guys behind the counter they are, but not for the people crowding it from the other side, filling the dining room, and spilling out onto the street. For them, it’s about celebrity. Some fancy-ass pizza joint in Brooklyn has become the culinary equivalent of a trip to the top of the Empire State Building, or taking in a Broadway show: a long wait for an overpriced supposed acme that, frankly, ain’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe this adds to people’s sense of self-importance, of having accomplished something. There’s lots of great food to eat in New York, maybe more varieties of great food than in any other city in the US, certainly of any city in the Northeast. Pizza is simply the most accessible, the most widely accepted, the one that your pals from Sheboygan will understand. If you say, “I went to this place on Sackett St. and had the most incredible Chinese dumplings of my life,” people will look at you like, heh? meh? so what? Tell someone like me that you had the best chicken feet of your life someplace I’ve never heard of, and I’ll pull out my calendar so we can sync up for dinner. But tell the folks back home that you waited in line for an hour at Di Fara for a slice of their legendary pizza, and that it really was all that, you’ll get respect. It’s pizza: universal, relateable, unthreatening; and, suddenly, by virtue of having gone out of your way to wait in line an hour for some tomato sauce and cheese on some flatbread, you’re a member of its elite. They’ll want to go there, too. It’s like Carnival Cruise Lines used to advertise, “They’d never believe it, if my friends could see me now.”

What did David Foster Wallace call his book about taking one of those cruises? A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again? Yeah, what he said.

* Not that the imported flour thing matters much. In Williamsburg days, I frequented Napoli Bakery, supplier of breads to local households and restaurants alike, where the coal-burning oven burns through a literal ton of the sedimentary stuff each week. “Ooh,” cooed a foodie dinner guest, between nibbles of crust and crumb. “The flour must be IM-ported.” Because flour from the US couldn’t make bread that good. Right. So, next time I was at the bakery, I asked, and was pointed to the stack of 100lb. bags of plain-old ordinary US-grown-and-processed bread flour. Sometimes, it isn’t what you start with, so much as what you do with it.