Native New Yorker here. Out of towners are obsessed with the BEST slice, but the true measure of NYC's 45 degree greatness is the decent quality following a Poisson distribution. My tip: just travel to any random spot in the five boroughs. First; you will be impressed how close you are to a pizza spot wherever you are. Second: you will be impressed with the slice, and with the variety of people who are good at making it.
I 100% agree, and I've only visited NYC a couple times.
Each time I visit, I try to eat at least one slice of pizza and one bagel every day. The thing that blows me away is how generally good they are, no matter where I buy them. Of course I'll look at reviews, but I won't walk more than 5 blocks to get a slice. Never been disappointed.
Same thing visiting Paris - you can hunt for the BEST croissant, but the remarkable thing is that nearly everywhere you shop, you'll find a really, really good one. I live near Arsicault in SF, and though they might make the BEST croissant in the US (and I will probably live a shorter life due to the number of them I put in my body every week), I'd trade that for a really good croissant on every corner.
I think it reflects having shared cultural values around the food and a knowledge in the community of what makes the food great both in terms of inputs and outputs, and I hope we never stop valuing good pizza!!
One thing I've heard said about French food generally in the past is that there's an entire supply chain in France around French food in particular so you really tend not to get bad French staples at very many places--even if it's a random touristy place.
You can rinse and repeat in many places for various items. For example, when I was last in Germany, you'd get good sandwiches with good bread at any random train station in a system of any size. Try that in the US.
> so you really tend not to get bad French staples at very many places--even if it's a random touristy place.
French here! I'm usually not that picky with croissants, but much more with other patisseries, such as eclairs. It's a bit harder to find good patisseries, and the quality doesn't always correlate with the price. Even in what looks like legit "patisseries artisanales", you can find eclairs which are basically frozen industrial stuff and sell for 3.50+ euros, which I think is a scam.
That being said, yes, I think you can normally find decent bread, croissants and patisseries (and cheese) pretty much everywhere in France.
On a side note, I lived in London and I noticed that Sainsbury made good bread and croissants, for much cheaper than the fancy "French" bakeries.
Maybe I'm wrong but I had the impression that in France pastry shops had legit pastry chefs who had to go through apprenticeships whereas in America for example, pastry shops give a baker a recipe to follow and that's pretty much it (for the ones that bake in-house I mean)
It varies. Your neighborhood bakery/pastry shop may have a baker that learned from their parent(s). Or it could be a higher-end shop with a trained patisserie chef. Or it could be a 'front' bakery that receives their daily shipment from a regional factory that makes them by hand or by machine.
> France pastry shops had legit pastry chefs who had to go through apprenticeships
It depends. Nowadays it's not always the case. To reduce costs, apparently quite a lot of shops sell industrial pastries. For bread, there's a label apparent on the shop that certifies whether the bread is made in house ("artisan boulanger"), but it's not true for pastries. It's hard to say exactly what is made in-house without asking.
For simpler items like croissants, IMO the recipe and following directions is all that matters.
I've made a decent amount of semi complex desserts from recipe authors I trust and they turned out great.
Sure, there are some minor physical skills you learn and knowledge you gain, but for baking I find that as long as you follow good recipes precisely you can get great results.
This does fall apart when you start talking about decorating desserts as that is definitely more art/skill than science.
In the 80s some bright spark realised that the smell of baking bread makes people hungry and buy more food, so now most large-enough UK supermarkets bake in-store.
Not to mention they have typically been making the regional food for centuries, if not millennia. The selection can be more limited in the EU, but the quality is incredible, and at a very low price point compared to US.
You can get cheese and wine made in the US ~ as good as French, but it’s 5x as expensive.
I don’t know about the cheese but I disagree with you about the wine. For example Californian wine is excellent, and you get a much higher quality for the money than with French wine for anything below $150. French wine is in much higher demand so all the lowest quality is sold too, instead of being made vinegar or discarded, becoming the entry level. French wine is subjected to strict rules that don’t allow them correct them like the Californian do, like adding a bit of water here or there… etc. In places where you have to import both the quality difference for the money is evident, within the us is abysmal
California wine can be excellent but is overpriced, and I am a native Californian raised on California wine. French wine has impressively consistent quality at low price points. You can’t easily buy good cheap French wine in California I’ve discovered, but you can in other parts of the country. There are certain types of wine that California does better, but France does much better for the price generally. This was not the case a few decades ago, but global competition crushed the price of French wine and opened the global wine trade. France has so many regions that produce excellent wine without the brand premium of Bordeaux, Burgundy, et al.
Because I no longer live in California, there is excellent distribution of French wine where I live. Now I can buy myriad discerning $15 bottles of French wine that frankly are much better than what you can typically buy from California for the same price point in the US. California wines are overpriced for the quality. I’d prefer that were not the case but that’s the reality in my experience.
At any price point, French wine is lower risk than California wine. Their reputation for wine is deserved.
You need to sample the price/quality in France, not on goods exported elsewhere - that’s the key point of this observation. French products are often expensive abroad, but dirt-cheap locally.
The top-quartile 5-10 EUR bottle of wine at the hypermarche is way better than anything in the <$20 price range made in the US. A $15 lump of cheese would be a few EUR in France at quality-parity.
Just want to say you took the words out of my mouth on this one. I was given the exact same advice re: Parisian croissants, and I feel exactly the same way about Arsicault in SF. I’d I’ve never had a better one in the US, let alone SF.
Note to others: Arsicault is worth the visit if you’re in SF! Also don’t be a sucker and wait in line for an hour on a Saturday morning. Just go at like 11am on a Tuesday and walk right in.
I've spent a lot of time in Paris and NYC but have found it very hard to find a randomly good croissant; less so a randomly good slice. I've tried many of the foodie favorites for both and been largely unimpressed. There have a few truly excellent. Maybe they ruined me for others.
Finding a decent croissant is fairly easy in Paris, but if you've ever tasted an actually good croissant, buttery but not sickening, airy but not empty, crispy but not dry, you know how incredibly difficult to find those are.
Not Boston’s but I’ve had a ton of “you have to try this one bagel shop in town, it’s just like New York!”
Generally speaking they’ve been decent enough bagels, but the shops don’t have the turnover to be able to ask “what’s hot?” and get a reasonable answer.
Also, the appetizing game tends to be pretty weak. Occasionally a shop will fly in Acme, which is admittedly impressive, but it tends to only be nova. I’m hard pressed to find herring in cream sauce, whitefish salad, or belly lox outside of the tristate area.
It's basically a Jewish deli which I'm happy to see is apparently open for dinner again. (Closed for dinner pre-COVID.) Yes, very good in Kendall in Cambridge though they also apparently have a couple of other locations now.
There are a number of foods that are supposedly only being amazing within a certain geographic location, but the best ones I've had were far outside if that location.
The best shrimp poboy I had was in Tampa; nothing I could find in New Orleans even came close. There was a New York style pizza place in Shanghai which people that went back to America would talk about missing (better than any pizza I've had in NYC). An Italian person I knew visited D.C. and when they got back to Rome they kept talking about how much they missed the pizza place in Washington.
For bagels, best I've ever had is probably a split between New Jersey (not _far_ from NYC) and Montreal.
Best pizza I’ve ever had. Franks in New Haven is close, but just not that crazy about thin crust.
(Ironically, some of the worst “real” pizza I’ve had was at the Atlanta restaurant owned by someone whose “How to make real pizza” page gets posted here every year or two. Yea, it had a nice char but everything about it was just bland bland bland)
> There was a New York style pizza place in Shanghai which people that went back to America would talk about missing (better than any pizza I've had in NYC).
I really like croissants but haven't ever been to Paris. My last trip abroad was to Portugal and it was crazy how some sandwich shop at the train station had croissants that tasted better than any specialty bakeshop I've ever been to in the US.
It's not about quality when they're reducing sauce to save money, as stated in the article. The slices may still be better than in any other state, but the focus has shifted from quality to price.
Doppio Zero on Hayes by Davis Symphony was quite good, although a bit fancier. Amici's East Coast Pizzeria on Lombard in Marina was also very tasty. Also, it's not as fun, but Mountain Mikes is also great, inexpensive pizza, like in your Papa Johns range but better overall.
Like out-of-towners asking which cheese steak shop in Philly is the best. The best is whichever corner shop is closest to you. If you're local and eat cheese steaks often, you don't drive all the way across the city to get such a lunch. You walk one or two blocks whichever shop you're near. But visitors want to experience the best, not experience it as a local would.
Random cheesesteaks in Philly are far better than random cheesesteaks in any other city, but I would never recommend a tourist to go to a random spot over one of the highly rated places. You'll just feel it was good but over hyped. It's a waste of time for someone who is there temporarily and doesn't live in the city.
If you go to a place like Joe's you'll understand why the food became famous in the first place and how much better cheesesteaks are in Philly.
I was in Philly a few years ago for a day trip and tried two different cheesesteaks. Both were fine, but they're not places I would ever seek out again.
I've definitely had better delicious hot steak sandwiches with cheese and toppings in other places. Maybe I was expecting something different, or maybe you've got a point?
Guess I'll have to get to Joe's if I am in Philly again!
Honestly, Joe's is just a random place. If you're near there don't even bother with cheesesteaks. There's so many great places to eat along that corridor, whether you want a sandwich (like at Costinello's or Liberty Kitchen), Falafel at Goldie's, something fancier/more substantial at Elwood, Suraya, Middle Child, Cheu, etc. Or just want to eat at a bar, there's JB's, Kraftwerk and more, with great new places popping up all the time. This is true in most neighborhoods.
The steak shops on South Street (Jim's when it reopens and Ishkibibble's) are probably the best places to eat in a touristy area where there's nothing else better around. Campo's or Sonny's in Olde City are good too if you can't get a table at a real restaurant or just want something quick.
so many great places in this post. i'd also add angelo's. that's been my favorite steak since moving to the city (but also want to try d'alessandros, have heard good things)
To be honest I've never found cheesesteaks to be exceptional, the best of them are just pretty good, cheap, convenient and satisfying. I tell people that if they want a really good sandwich in Philly, they should go to DiNic's for one of his pulled or roast pork sandwiches. It's in Reading Terminal Market, which is a pretty nice place to take visitors anyway.
I guess we have opposite opinions, as I'm convinced the glowing recommendations for the pork rabe sandwiches are mostly manufactured by people with blogs, vlogs, and listicles to make who weren't getting any return writing yet another story about cheesesteaks. The good cheesesteak places don't really change much.
I went to college in Philly and not once did anybody ever suggest we go get one. When I was visiting a few years I was the one who told my friends about the sandwich. They'd grown up in Philly and never heard a mention of it. We made a whole trip of it.
It's a unique sandwich and not bad, but everyone felt we should have made a trip of going to get our favorite cheesesteak instead.
Out-of-towners are obsessed with the BEST, most obscure everything. It's one of the things I liked least about living in the city. Everything always felt like a competition about who knew the coolest places.
It's comical that someone would travel more than a few minutes within NYC just to try a slice of pizza. Like if it's a nice neapolitan pie, sure. But just for a standard NYC-style slice? That's a waste of time. All the places that typically top people's list, like Joe's Pizza, Prince St. Pizza, Bleecker St., etc., are all very mid. You can get an equally good slice as those big names in almost any neighborhood.
I travel well outside my neighborhood for standard slices regularly and I've never felt it's a waste of time.
But maybe an out-of-towner feeling they need to find the perfect slice is a different perspective than mine as a local. I know what I want out of the places I seek out and I'm comfortable with whatever extra time investment that requires.
I disagree. Here in Prospect Heights the pizza is a solid notch below than Prince St or Bleecker St and I think it is worth making a pit stop to get a slice at those places. Restaurants like L’Industrie are worth a whole trip on their own to visit.
Frankly because in many (not all) places (and especially true the further back you go) -- there's very few good ... anything. When I first moved to Austin TX in 99 I remember being really puzzled by how bad all the food was. Like nearly everything was mediocre. Very slowly better places popped up and everyone talked about them. The one exception was BBQ, and to that end yes -- the "best" was Franklins but frankly it was nearly all very good.
But overtime, other good stuff started to pop up, and eventually there were enough good places that "the best" became less interesting. Still, Austin is far away from NYC, and of the few times I visited Europe (Italy specifically) nearly everywhere in the US is a bit behind. IMHO that's largely b/c of how new everything is. Overtime as areas become more established, things get passed down and around, the quality of everything goes up. And in some places, there's so much good stuff that yeah it makes no sense to talk about best anymore. But for many places the difference between the best and the rest is the decision point of "is it worth going at all?".
When I came into this thread I immediately did a search for Prince knowing there would be a comment about it here.
I do like their slices but I am not leaving mid-town for that. I perfectly enjoy Upside Pizza slices.
Prince st pizza is a joke, it's literally just a pepperoni gimmick and any serious NY'er isn't putting up with that crap, let alone waiting on a stupidly long line to eat it.
I tried it because I worked around there and it was before it went viral. There's no need to travel across the city to try a "slice". When I'm in a neighborhood that has a good spot, I'll stop through. There's nothing about Prince st that requires it being tried unless you want to participate in the trend. It's just a basic pizza place that went viral because they put a stupid amount of cupping pepperoni on their slices. It's really got nothing to do with what I'd call my conception or experience of pizza as a lifelong New Yorker.
That's because most of us have good pizza joints back home too, and we want to find out whether NY's famous pizza outdoes the places we know and like. We're usually only visiting for a short time and can't try six different pizza places unless we're going to eat nothing but pizza on our trip. And the best place often isn't the famous place. So it's worth it to us to put in the effort to search, while a local might not care as much where they get their pizza.
I have to strongly disagree. It is kind of fun and amazing how many pizza places there are around every corner. The problem is, most of them are sub par. In fact, I feel bad for people visiting who just walk into a random slice place because odds are it won't be very good. The great thing about NY pizza is that it very good and very plentiful. But the crappy slice joints are even more plentiful.
I agree. There are so many crappy pizza places in NY, especially in Manhattan. It’s a risk trying some random place. NJ has better and more consistent pizza and bagels. That said, I don’t even try to get pizza elsewhere, I’ve had some really extra gross greasy pizza in other states. For some reason, I’ve never been to a mountain town that can get it right.
Agree. I grew up in NJ and lived a few years in NYC. NYC has a lot of variation in what is called NY style pizza. A lot of it is bad. In NJ, the NY style pizza is a lot more consistent and overall better than NYC. Living in NYC I was always puzzled how there could exist such bad pizza there. Mostly I’m talking about Manhattan. Maybe it’s bad to me and not others, and has to do with NYC having so many residents that grew up elsewhere, bringing their own varied tastes in pizza?
> Living in NYC I was always puzzled how there could exist such bad pizza there.
Living in Barcelona I think this is pretty clear: Tourists. Though what's pizza in NYC is paella and tapas here of course.
Their reasoning is simple. Most tourists don't ever come back so why bother investing in a quality product when you can just milk them for what they're worth. Even reviews don't help with this very much.
As a local it's easy to avoid these places. Avoiding the ones with pictures of the food and sticky promoters outside trying to get you in the door does most of it. And realizing that most of the best places don't have the shiniest venues precisely because they don't need to. The locals know where to find them anyway.
I’m so relieved to see others recognizing this and it’s not just me.
My theory is NYC had better average pizza in the past but people move out of the city over time. They probably move to lower cost areas. Many pizza makers in NJ are originally from NYC. The pizza is better in NJ on average.
Average New York pizza quality is highly over rated. If you go to any random spot you are likely to get bad pizza. I think this has changed over time. Often there is better pizza in New Jersey.
This is not a joke. I strongly disagree with advising people to try random NYC pizza places. My theory is a lot of the good pizza makers moved out of the city to the suburbs or lower cost cities.
I agree wholeheartedly. Thanks for having the courage to state this.
I think the reasons are straightforward: 1: The supply chain has evolved. Affordable ingredients are mass produced and low quality and a pizza place needs a strong motive to choose better ingredients. 2: family pride has not passed to current generations. And as you say most of those families have migrated out to the suburbs.
To be fair, I still think the bar is much lower outside the NY area. So visitors may legitimately love places we cringe at. And more power to them, frankly.
I think the decline extends to the suburbs too. Would love to get some of your New Jersey recs.
Similarly, you could do the same thing on the other end of the state in Buffalo, NY. Hard to find a truly disappointing slice. What you will find, however, is a variety in "style" of pizza. They all live somewhere in the neighborhood of 80/20 NY/Chicago style. Easy to find a nice thin slice, but plenty of thicker doughier options. Never so far as a full deep-dish.
That's what I used to tell people about San Francisco when I lived there twenty years ago -- the high end restaurants are great, but what's more impressive is that the average neighborhood eatery is more often than not really amazing, too.
> the high end restaurants are great, but what's more impressive is that the average neighborhood eatery is more often than not really amazing, too.
Absolutely! I share the same.
Part of that is the fine dining though. Fine dining is its own culture, and just like other Bay Area industries, once you get some good chefs in the city, they'll train people who open their own restaurants. Then the quality expectations go up among residents... and everything ends up better, even "down market".
This is absolute Seraghina slander. Maybe it's not Ops quality, but definitely better than Barboncino and one of the greats in the Roberta's-style lineage.
One good place in a whole neighborhood doesn’t change this! New York is plagued with bad pizza in the outer residential areas. The median pizza place in Bed-Stuy is not good.
Seraghina is great, the sourdough crust is sooo good. I like Speedy Romeo a lot too but I think it’s on the wrong side of Classon to officially be Bed-Stuy.
Billy Joel sings about walking through Bed Stuy alone as akin riding his motorcycle in the rain. Taking his life in his hands. It still amazes me that well off people live there now.
There's a lot of bad pizza in NYC, as well. Really depends on the establishment and customer expectations.
If someone is planning to visit there with the belief that they can throw a stone and immediately hit a great pizza place, they'll probably be disappointed.
There are also bad Italian restaurants, bagel places, coffee shops, Chinese food, etc.
It bothers me that someone would say they are all good. There is no need to hype up NYC. You can get very high quality food, but not just by randomly going into a place.
This seems to be a pattern across regions, across foods! I have said the same of Hyderabad and Biryani. But none the less, when someone asks for a recommendation, I give a 70th or 80th percentile near their stay. Better than them randomly walking to a 20th percentile place because it was well lit.
I've been to NYC once as a kid but I don't think we ever got pizza. I've had "NYC Style" elsewhere but it's always whatever. I had some business way out in Long Island and on the way back to JFK, I wanted to stop and finally grab one slice of some real NY pizza. Weirdly there were no good pizza places near where I was working so I had missed out until the drive back to the airport. I stopped at New Park Pizza, waited in line, ordered at the window, and ate the best damn pizza I've ever had. It was hot as hell but everything about it was perfect. Up until today, I actually couldn't remember what the place was called but could remember it was next to a CVS and near JFK. I found it on Maps and was pretty happy to see it listed on the list in the link.
This is how I feel about bagels in NYC, but with pizza, and particularly slice shops (as opposed to restaurant style pizza) I do think the best slices in NYC are in a different class from any other American city
True with traveling generally. The best Thai food I had wasn't at the "best Thai food" place in Bangkok, it was on a streetcorner. The best kebab I've had in Berlin wasn't at Ruya's, it's my local guy.
For pizza this seems to have a halo effect as well. It you drop into a non-franchise pizzeria anywhere within roughly 50 miles of NYC then chances are you’ll have a pretty good NYC-style slice, and a reasonable chance of a slice that can stand next to most slices in NYC and still be proud of itself (if a bit awestruck by the company it finds itself in).
I’ve seen a bit of this in areas of the country that have seen some emigration from NYC outwards: NC, FL. Maybe less so as you go west, unless some here have encountered them?
They're not hunting for the "best slice" because they want the best slice -- they just want a story to tell. Most people can't tell the difference between good and ok food.
It's because the BEST Pizza in NYC is probably on par with some of the best pizza in other cities. Great chefs can make great Pizza. They can do this wherever they are.
What makes a town renowned for a type of food is the MEDIAN quality.
Vancouver has more Sushi restaurants than Starbucks and bad ones don't last. You are always within a 15 minute walk to a better sushi restaurant than 90% of cities outside of Japan.
I have found it to be the opposite. If I walk into whatever random pizza shop happens to be nearby I’m always taken aback out how often it’s … ok.
There’s a lot of good pizza to be found but even more if it is just ok. Mind you I mean ok in the literal sense, and don’t mean it’s bad. But a lot of people make it seem like every street corner has amazing pizza. But that’s just not true
I would not make such a claim. Outside of lunchtime it's hard to find a shop with a decent slice that hasn't been sitting for too long. Even then, lots are mediocre some, if not all of the time. You will find yourself constantly browsing the case for the least crappy pizza because the one you really want isn't going to be good.
Agree, one thing though is some places you want the fresh slice out of the oven, other places you want the reheated slice (as they undercook the pizza with the expectation that it will be reheated later, and may even have to specify you want it “well done”)
> Native New Yorker here. Out of towners are obsessed with the BEST slice
I visited New York and ate at a pizza place† that advertised, if I recall correctly, their second-best rating according to someone who had made it their mission to sample and rate every pizza place in New York. (It couldn't have been this guy, since he says he started in 2014.)
The pizza was subpar. Why would I be interested in what someone in New York thinks makes a good pizza? I want pizza that I like, not pizza that some random guy from a different pizza culture likes.
† Not for the rating; I ate there because it was next to my hotel.
Ray's Pizza on St Mark's Place consistently rates in the top 3 of many B&T food bloggers rating New York Pizza. It also has some of the worst pizza I've ever eaten in my entire life and a tremendous rat problem.
Those ratings are bunk.
Sacco Pizza on 9th Avenue & 55th St is an underrated gem and a family business since 1972.
I’d love to see which reviewer rates Ray’s pizza that high in recent years. I thought it was just famous for being on Saint Marks and appealing to drunks
I would love to find "food safe heritage bagels" anywhere in the world, which would not be comfortable to the average modern palate today, so I've read.
These would be turn of the 20th century New York Jewish style bagels, made back then by bagel unions entirely by hand because the dough was too stiff for common kneading machines at that time (not quite sure how that squares with the giant industrial machines of the day, maybe the missing detail is the common bakery kneading machines were not up to the task though a hyper-expensive custom machine could be commissioned). These were so infamously toughly chewy they were hyperbolically touted as teeth breaking and taking an indecent amount of time to digest. "Food safe" because bagel bakery conditions at the turn of the 20th century are unacceptable these days.
Or maybe I've been bamboozled by food editors hunting for clicks.
Not a New Yorker but been there many times. My impression of NYC lizzy is that like anywhere you might find a surprise gem but for rhe most part NYC Pizza falls somewhere between school lunchroom and mall pizza.
If you want to brag about anything you have a much better case with bagels.
Many who grow up in the NY area grow up on pizza. In childhood, it's often eaten as a quick meal that doesn't require cooking. In adolescence, pizza is one of the only foods you can afford to eat out with your friends after school. In college, there's nothing like a drunken slice of pizza at 1 am. It's hard to overstate what a satisfying comfort food pizza is. There's truly nothing like it.
I agree and would compare it to chips (French Fries) from a chipper in western europe. Grew up on the stuff and a bag of chips was affordable after school, was cheap when in college, and food from a chipper is a relatively cheap and delicious dinner option. I live in the US now and it's funny that I've not come across chips as a standalone meal, except in Irish/UK expat communities.
I, personally, occasionally miss choking on the super stringy cheese of bowling alley pizza of elementary school era birthday parties. Do not miss drunken pizza of college as much.. Now it's just mostly costco frozen 5-pack
As a person who also grew up in NY, the slice was part of my childhood. I'd walk home from middle school and then high school and pass the local pizzeria where I could pick up a slice, Italian ice, and play coin operated video games. Galaga, Donkey Kong, and Pacman. I miss those carefree days where the world was simpler and the pizza tasted better.
I generally like pizza, but more interested in rich and sophisticated toppings, not just dough and cheese. Normally I have pizza about once in a month (except when I am vacationing in Italy, of course). If what you are saying is close to reality, I think I have an answer to US obesity problem.
It's different in NY due to the ubiquity, downward pressure on price, and all-hour coverage. You can be nearly anywhere, at any time, and be fed in minutes. You often eat while standing and remaining social. The experience anchors itself in your mind as an instant, omnipresent solution to hunger. There's also probably something to the infinitely nuanced territorial aspect of which slice is better (the answer is Prince Street).
Less mentioned about NYC is the 24-hour egg and sausage breakfast sandwich, fresh off a griddle. This, more than pizza, was my staple when I went to college in New York.
Egg and bacon / egg and sausage were like $2 when I was there in the 90s. And they were about twice the diameter of the ones you get at McDonalds. I don't know what it costs now, maybe this is something like avocado toast that's become anomalously expensive, but calorie for calorie it was as cheap or cheaper than pizza back then. They could be bought from most bodegas that had a stove, as the peer points out. (The LA equivalent of this type of bodega was the "roach coach" - distinguished from modern food trucks by (a) an apparent lack of formal licensing, (b) presence of construction workers eating there, and (c) charging about 30% the price for the same items. The breakfast burrito, however, had not yet migrated to the East Coast).
At most non-fancy corner stores they're still under $4. Usually under $3 if you just want egg & cheese. And they're always made to order - ketchup, mayo, salt/pepper, hot sauce, on a roll or bagel, 50 cents extra for a tomato. I know New Yorkers can be a little insufferable about their bodegas, but I've lived in a few other major cities and none of them have provided me with this much access to a cheap breakfast.
It's true though, good breakfast burritos are still hard to come by here.
Thanks for the delicious reminder of how good those are! Nice to hear they're still competitive with pizza prices! I only eat once a day, since before college, so breakfast foods were like a sort of yearned-for delicacy in my world, especially at 3am in Brooklyn. That or cheap dumplings if I was anywhere near Chinatown. Hot corn muffin from the street vendor out my door if I was absolutely hung over and needed something in the morning...
Back on the west coast, the price of a breakfast burrito at my local cart has almost doubled since covid, and the burrito got smaller. My conclusion is that burritos are a scam. The contents of the classic round breakfast sandwich are much harder to fake.
I really miss the McDonald's egg and sausage muffins, mediocre as they are. They stopped doing the special breakfast menu during the pandemic here in Spain and it never came back. They only have it at the airport locations now.
The McCafe locations have a Spanish omelette roll again but it's not the same thing :'(
Kaiser rolls are really the shit. It should be noted to the class warrior above... you used to be able to sit down in a lot of sit-down restaurants on the Lower East Side, and get a basket of free kaiser rolls and butter before you even ordered food. A foreign concept, I know! You could eat em and scram if you were of the mind to. That was when people had more class than to get a little nudge of self congratulations from judging each other's pocketbook based on which cheap fast food they ate, hoping for a popular online mob to agree with their stupidly ill informed opinion. But this will all fall on deaf ears, so, hallelujah there's still cheap breakfast sandwiches, and let the culture warriors who never experienced human civilization stick it up their ass.
Wtf are you talking about my guy. Subs are larger and carry more meat, so the sandwiches cost more. There’s no quality judgement in that statement (also weird to think of a sub roll as like some kind of luxury). It’s like saying a small coffee at Starbucks costs less than a large.
Starting to think maybe you’ve never been in a deli!
The Ninja Turtles got this picky-eater-as-a-child fella to give it a fair shake. Was my undisputed favorite type of food for like 15 years straight (when I started trying more things and discovered Middle Eastern and Indian food).
And that's out in a part of the country with mostly-bad pizza options. Nothing half as good as a so-so NY slice, certainly.
Absolutely not. I've lived in a lot of places in the US, and almost none of them outside of a couple of major cities in New England had the equivalent of a NY slice. This has only changed somewhat recently (maybe past decade or so). Even still, it's not nearly as ubiquitous.
It's kind of similar with bodegas, a lot of people will say "we have corner stores too" but that's not a bodega. It sounds snobbish sometimes but there are a lot of actual differences.
> I've lived in a lot of places in the US, and almost none of them outside of a couple of major cities in New England had the equivalent of a NY slice.
I’ve spent time in New Haven and NYC and… not even close. Sure there’s good slices in New Haven, but there are also pizza deserts, and a lot of them. New Haven does compete with NYC on restaurant-style pizza though.
Yeah this is how this conversation typically goes "but we've got good pizza from X, Y, Z restaurant" — is not the same as just walking to the corner and paying $2 for a big cheese slice — the NY slice is essentially a street food, like street tacos are in some states along the mexican border
Grow up on can mean a lot of things here, I and many other New Yorkers would take it to mean the food that has the most significance in our memories. Its not about eating this stuff every day, it’s about the food we cherish.
A good point but it's less about daily diet (sure, some people might), more about it being a go-to treat, for "cheat days" (days set aside to "cheat" during your diet), parties, sports games, work or school special occasions, etc.
That you can blame on sugar in everything. Even what was blamed on saturated fat turns out to be caused by sugar and trans fat ("hydrogenated vegetable oil", now more-or-less banned, with certain disgraceful exceptions).
The dough is all carbs, which causes the same problem as sugar, and I am sure many places use sugar in their sauce. Unless you are doing a lot of cardio, a slice of cheese pizza is pretty void of nutrition.
The starch in dough is broken up into glucose, which is absolutely fine: nobody gets sick from eating starch. It would be better with some fiber, so your intestinal bacteria could have some of it.
The problem with sugar is that it is half fructose, and fructose is processed on the same pathway as alcohol, in the liver, and causes the same illnesses as alcohol. It is much better, if you must eat it, to eat enough fiber with it that your intestinal bacteria get much of it instead.
If you don't keep your intestinal bacteria well-fed, they are obliged to eat you instead.
100g of salted mozzarella has 300 calories, saturated fat, and sodium. Ultimately, pizza is basically 3 ingredients: bread, tomato sauce, and mozzarella. Most people don’t consider those individual ingredients particularly unhealthy.
The best slice in the Boston area ("the city that always sleeps") was the one you could get at 2am. It had a loose connection to HN-style hackers.
Hi-Fi Pizza and Subs was a rare place that would serve the Central Square clubgoers around last call, as well as the people walking home in the cold from a late night at MIT.
There'd be a welcoming warm light from the somewhat gritty street, and a fast moving line. You'd get to the front of the line, say something like "slice of mushroom, please", they'd always say "2.10, please", you pay and take it, and step to the side, to quickly shake the container of grated parmesan. Then you walk the rest of the way home (or back to the lab), munching the slice, soul recharged by warm tasty cheese and crust.
Man, I loved Hi-Fi. Don't get me wrong, I love Clover, but Hi-Fi was special. Their mozzarella sticks used to have south asian spices sprinkled, and to me it was the the best of the east and the west. So many late nights were thawed by that place.
FWIW, I think Mary Chung wanted to retire and be done with it.
One time, I was picking up rare takeout at Mary Chung, and I somewhat excitedly asked the older woman at the register, "Are you Mary Chung?" She smiled and said, "Yes, we are." :)
I’m sad to learn that Mary Chung’s is gone. There was little better than a double order of extra spicy suanla chaoshou with a can of coke on a cold day.
Back in the early 2000’s I read an interview with Ben Affleck where he said his favorite pizza was HIFi! Sadly I can’t find the article via an internet search; it was in some inflight magazine I was flipping through to kill time.
> but the overall quality of your average slice in the city has definitely suffered
This is true of the big national chains, too. They've kept prices relatively stable for damn near 25 years, at this point, but quality has gotten far worse over that same time span. That mouth-watering Pizza Hut pie you remember from 1992 isn't all nostalgia—every now and then I find single-location or small-chain joints that make pizza very similar to how I remember those tasting. Thing is, those are like $15+ a pie now, with a coupon or special. But you can still get larges for $8 or less (coupon or special, which are available 100% of the time) at the major chains—they're just not the same pizza you were getting in the 80s up to about the late 90s.
[EDIT] In fact, the 2020-on inflation is the first time I've seen the big chains seriously give in on keeping price increases in check. They've gone up like 20% in the last couple years.
Pizza Hut pan pizza is the easiest pizza to make yourself at home. You don't need a stand mixer, it's a no knead recipe (long overnight rise builds all the gluten). You don't need a fancy super hot oven, it just cooks at 400 degrees F in a cast iron skillet. Give this recipe a shot, it's unbelievably good and very accessible: https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-pan-pizza-recipe or https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-srfPL5CWZs
The Ligurian focaccia recipe brines it with salt water, which you don't strictly have to do but helps considerably, and bakes at 450F, which arguably so should any cast-iron pizza because the crust won't crisp up as much at 400F.
Focaccia is basically pizza without the sauce so I'm not sure if the clarification is helpful? Wikipedia claims that some places even call focaccia pizza bianca
There is no way that New York style pizza can be compared to Focaccia. They have almost nothing in common. Now that Chicago thing, maybe. But as far as I'm concerned, that's not pizza.
No one said this was NY style. The original comment was lamenting that Pizza Hut pan pizza doesn't taste as good as it did in the 80s and 90s. I pointed out recipes that directly mimic that classic pan pizza style. Pizza Hut is not and has never claimed to be New York style pizza. It's an entirely different style that's neither New York nor Chicago style. It's closest to Detroit style pizza.
Pizza by ingredients is just flour, water, salt, yeast. All the details and differences are in hydration and how it is mixed/kneaded/baked. It really is the definition of "the devil is in the details".
Yes and if you've had a Pizza Hut pan pizza it tastes just like a buttery focaccia bread smothered in cheese and sauce.
The ATK recipe at 400 degrees works because you cook it on the very bottom rack right next to the heating element. Then when it's done you cook it longer on your range at medium heat to really crisp the crust--it's in a cast iron pan after all. You can get the crust as toasty as you want.
I've got about as good a home pizza game as one can have without a modded or specialty oven, and can confirm, cast iron pan pizza is the perfect place for a newbie to start. The transfer from peel to cook surface is the most likely thing to go catastrophically wrong for someone starting out—pan pizza eliminates that step. No special equipment needed whatsoever—no peel, no stone, don't even need farina or coarse cornmeal on-hand. You can just cut it with a chef's knife or a cleaver (those are better than those stupid round-blade spinning cutters, anyway, and they're not that much worse than the long rocking-blade variety). About the only way to ruin it beyond fixing is to forget about it in the oven. It's an almost fool-proof dish, and great for building confidence that you can make good pizza at home.
I just make the pizza on parchment paper on the counter, and then pick up the whole thing and transfer it, with the paper, to the pizza stone in the oven
This is an OK alternative to my peel-method posted below, but it can be tough not to let the toppings pile toward the center, since it tends to bow downward in the middle. I've done it before, it works alright.
I eventually settled on this too. My oven is a standard oven, not super hot, so we get enough heat through the paper from the stone before the top is done. But I do think a semi-deep cast iron pan pizza is ideal and foolproof for the home cook.
If cooking on entirely flat surface, the parchment paper method described in other comments works well, though it's precarious with larger or heavier pies, need two people to avoid having the parchment paper spill out. If cooking in a cast iron pan, I just preheat the pan in the oven, and have all the ingredients set aside and dough prepared, and when the oven is ready, pull out the pan, put pan on stove top, lightly oil, and put dough in pan, and then put toppings on it fast and insert in oven. This works for the dough recipe I use, YMMV.
Eventually develop a whole methodology around launching pizza. Use a smooth floured wooden paddle. Know how much sauce a certain dough can hold before sticking. Avoid ingredients in sizes that tend to fall off. Test motion before putting in the oven, and if its sticking know that you can reflour under it piece by piece but attempting to launch a even slightly sticking pizza will always end in disaster.
I ended up getting 2 peels. Wooden to launch, steel to remove. Also use semolina or cornmeal on the peel and as soon as the dough hits the peel the clock starts so move fast. Always have the toppings ready to go before that point.
More transfer medium than you think you should need. Experiment with the amount.
If you don't know what I mean, I'm talking about coarse-ground cornmeal or farina, the latter of which is a very coarse-ground wheat flour sometimes used to make a kind of cereal-mush kinda like oatmeal or cream-of-wheat—but it's also outstanding for this job; coarse durham-wheat can do in a pinch, but it's too fine to really be good at it, plus it tends to be expensive while farina's usually cheap (and so's cornmeal, but avoid the fine stuff, you want the coarsest you can get).
You put this on the peel before placing the stretched dough on it and adding toppings. Just spread it in a layer over the top of it. It helps keep it from sticking, which makes the transfer easier.
I've found different peels require different amounts. I had a shitty looking peel that was somewhat-rough, unfinished wood and it didn't require much. It got ruined (I'll spare you the details, but, kids) and I replaced it with a cheap but fancier-looking one I found on amazon, that's dark-stained, smooth acacia or some shit. It's awful. I need so much more medium on it to keep the pizza from sticking. I've thought about roughing it up with sandpaper, see if that helps, but haven't tried it yet—if yours is smooth-finished and you want to be a pioneer, maybe try that. First pie I tried to cook with that thing was the first I'd ruined in years. Still mad about it :-)
You probably don't need so much that you can't see any of the peel under it, though, even on one that bad. My better peel only required a light dusting, once I got my technique down.
Point is, definitely use that stuff, and experiment with the amount of that you put on. The more you have to use, the more waste and the more mess, so there's good reason to dial in what you actually need and not just pile a ton on every time, but you need some amount.
As far as technique: shake it loose over the sink (so any cornmeal or flour that falls off goes there instead of the floor or whatever) right before transferring to the oven. Just hold it level and shake horizontally, forward and back or side to side, until the whole pie's loose and moves freely. If you have spots that stick really badly, uh, try to lift it up and put more medium under it? This has never worked well for me, I've just gotten good at making sure that doesn't happen, but sometimes you can save it that way.
Then, when transferring into the oven, you need to hold it at an angle shallow enough that gravity alone will not do the work—too steep an angle, and it'll pile up when it comes off. You'll need the same sort of shaking action here, but because it's tilted a little it'll also slide off as it goes. Start with the edge of the peel way at the back of your stone, maybe just an inch or so from the back edge of it, and move it forward as the pie comes off, else your placement will suck and, in the worst case, some of it won't be on the stone.
For your specific question: For one pizza for one, I start with the dough prepared as in the posts. The dough is in a covered plastic container, about 12 ounces to leave room in cases of the dough expanding. I dump the dough on a round sheet of Teflon. The sheet just nicely fits in the bottom of a common cast iron frying pan. I got the sheet from a long roll of such Teflon from Amazon, sold for drying fruit or some such. But it's Teflon so will withstand the heat of cooking -- it should and in my experience of some years, does.
So, now the round sheet of Teflon is on my cutting board and the pizza dough has been dumped onto the Teflon. Then with fingers, I press the dough to be round and nearly covering the Teflon. As in my posts, then I add tomato sauce, Mozzarella cheese, and slices of pepperoni sausage. Right, I have found no need for electric mixers, rolling pins, cooking spray, etc. Fingers work fine.
Now for your question, how to move to the frying pan!!! I slide a spatula under the right part of the Teflon, and that serves to support about half of the sheet and the raw pizza. So, with a right hand finger on part of the Teflon to keep it on the spatula and two left hand fingers to support the left side of the Teflon, I carry the stack to the stove and the frying pan. So far, I've never dropped anything! But it would be a little safer to have the frying pan, so far just at room temperature, also on the cutting board so that the trip of the Teflon circle to the pan would be really short.
WOW! Right! Just thought of something MUCH better! Have the room temperature frying pan on the cutting board or even just the countertop, put the Teflon sheet in the frying pan, and THEN add the toppings, dough, sauce, cheese, sausage, etc. Sooo, no moving to the frying pan at all!!!! 100% no worries, no risk!!!
When the pizza is done, I slide the spatula under the Teflon and carry it and the pizza to the cutting board. At this point, the pizza crust is a little stiff and easier to carry without flopping. And, again, so far I've never had any trouble from this trip from the pan back to the cutting board and the action with a chef's knife. Since I'm no candidate for a champion of high coordination, I'm sure you can do this move just fine!
Else, put some heat resistant pad on the cutting board and move the whole frying pan to that pad and, thus, have a very short distance to move the cooked pizza to the cutting board and knife action!!!
A "heat resistant pad"? How about just a pot, about 2 quarts, cool?
Important note: when home-cooking pizza, you can easily fake the peel with a large cutting board (wooden! Plastic may melt!) only for the taking-out portion. It may require a little more manual assistance, but it does the job. It's a much worse idea for putting the pie in, though (you can probably make it work, but... I wouldn't risk it)
This is handy if you don't want to own more than one peel, but do want to be able to prep a second pizza on a peel while the first one is cooking.
I make pizza at home. If you let the dough ferment cold for at least overnight, the results are pretty darned good. I usually do a 3 day ferment in the fridge.
For amazing flavor, yes. But the biggest upside to pizza at home is that it is almost literally impossible to make a bad pizza. You can definitely do same-day dough, or even just buy dough balls from the grocery. Its hard to shortcut letting yeast work their magic.
My bread-machine dough takes 5 minutes of hand-on time and is ready in two hours. It's not as good as if you let it rest or do a fancier hand- or mixer-prep, but it absolutely will not keep your pizza from being better than any of the major chains (not that that's a high bar, but still).
You can get a nearly the same results in a couple hours if you keep a sour dough starter in your fridge and use the discard from that in your pizza dough. Add the discard to your warm water along with the yeast to warm it up.
I've done fancy dough plenty of times, but mostly just use lazy bread-machine dough these days. It's serviceable same-day—not as good as fancier preparations, but not as far off as one might think—and does also benefit from a night in the fridge, if one thinks to make it the day before. Just have to let it get back up to room temp before cooking, or it won't rise properly. Takes like five minutes of hands-on time, which is all just gathering and measuring the ingredients.
I've pretty much come to this conclusion as well, but I do still often cook the pizzas on my 12" Ooni Karu woodfired mini-oven though.. you don't get the same level of "leopard skin" / micro-bubbles, but it's mostly there.
If I have a bit more time, but still relatively lazy, I'll use the stand mixer, but proof in my oven for an hour or two, which has a proofing mode which is basically a low temperature steam oven for a nice warm humid environment.
My problem with homemade pizza was how much it costs. As someone who likes lots of toppings (pepperoni, sausage, olives, you name it), a pizza was costing me over $20 to make at home. At which point I guess I'd fail to see the point since it's now costing more and taking a lot of time.
Yeah although pickled or canned stuff like mushrooms, olives, etc. work great and you can just stockpile them in your pantry when you see them on sale. I usually make my pizzas with sausage instead of pepperoni because I find ground sausage cheaper than pepperoni. If you find stuff on sale all the core ingredients like cheese, sauce, etc. can last in your freezer for a long time.
I buy the ingredients in bulk at a warehouse store and freeze the stuff that normally goes in refrigerator to prevent spoilage. Both meat toppings and cheese would mold if I left it in the refrigerator too long.
Counterpoint: A $10 large "brooklyn" pizza from Dominos today is vastly better than any Pizza Hut or Dominos pizza ever was in the 90s. Not as good as a pizza from a halfway decent independent pizzeria, but half the price.
That's only because Dominos infamously, sometime during the 2010s(?), ran a campaign that amounted to "Our current pizza sucked, but we've got a new recipe that's better."
Yeah I occasionally get caught in the trap of trying their Brooklyn crust and every time I come to the conclusion that it's a lackluster disappointing product that isn't in any way different from any of their other pizzas in terms of quality. I've maybe had dominoes 2 times in the last 5 years which is why I keep forgetting XD
They tricked me once. I was hoping for something akin to Pizza Hut's short-lived early-'00s "Big New Yorker", which wasn't really like NY pizza but was a lot better than everything else PH was serving at the time. Nope, just as bad as their regular pizza.
What's weird is I was around for that, was in college and ate Domino's pretty regularly at the time, and everyone seems to believe it was indeed a lot better, but I thought it was a ton worse than what they had before. Just tasted like a lot more MSG and oregano.
I felt the same way. When I was in my early 20's, little caesers had $5 pizzas, so of course Dominos did $4 pizzas. One topping, large. Believe it or not, both were decent. No, nothing compared to NY slices or what have you, but good enough.
I tried Dominos after the 'realignment' and found it much worse than I remembered. But, it could be I hadn't eaten there in a few years prior...maybe it went from good, to bad, to ok in that timespan?
At the risk of sounding like an ad I’m kind of startled at how not-terrible Little Caesars is for the price. A lot of food and a completely reasonable tasting and baked pie for stupid cheap when compared to almost everything else.
Costco pizzas fill that niche for me. Ton of food for $10, somewhat better than Little Caesers, and until cost cutting measures during the pandemic, a very passable combo pizza.
Costco's pizza works out pretty damn well on a just-get-some-calories-in-me-but-don't-make-me-cook basis, too, if you want something you can carry out. Two days of calories for $10.
I don't know what it is now, but Cici used to have $1.99 all you can eat pizza buffets on certain days of the week. This would have been in the mid 90s. Unbelievably (suspiciously?) cheap even for then.
Little Caesars used to be so much better. This was the time period when they were selling you two pizzas on a paper-wrapped flat for the price of one major chain pizza.
Not sure when they switched to extreme value focus.
Even the late Anythony Bourdain could espouse on the greatness of an "objectively terrible" Wafflehouse meal.
There's a time and place for everything, and even the snobbiest of us food snobs can appreciate the time and place for the likes of Little Ceasars, Costco Pizza, Wafflehouse, et al.
I also love Waffle House's food despite, maybe even because, it's 'bad'. Their waffles are legit good; the rest is coffee shop slop of the highest order. Recommended. (Glad Bourdain had the guts to say this)
I contend Anthony Bourdain didn't actually know good food from bad. I have nothing against him, I enjoyed his show, it was quite engaging, and I wanted him to dispense good information--so I could use it--but his recommendations, for instance in the NY City area, were awful. (he prided himself on not describing the food he was trying, all he ever would say it is, "that's good".)
His career as a chef was at a brasserie serving brasserie fare which is basically like working at a French diner, not necessarily anything that's going to educate your palate.
Again, not criticizing him, I'm actually envious, I wish I could be happy eating mediocre food, my life would be much simpler.
The elevation of haute cuisine as “good” and common folk food as “mediocre” is strange to me.
Sometimes a cheap-ass $5 meal really does satisfy people far more than a Michelin star restaurant. Humble bragging about only being able to enjoy non-normie food sounds silly and unrefined, really.
I'm not referring to that. I'm referring to things like "what's the best pho" or pizza or pupusa or ramen
I do think as a chef learning haute cuisine is learning useful things about cooking and what makes some bread better than other bread, and what consistency a sauce should have and how to achieve it.
Little Ceasars is worse a in that it’s a bad pizza that gets worse over time. It sort of tastes like nothing until it cools, at which point it tastes like cardboard.
That doesn't mean he would have liked little ceasers. If anything, it really seems like you don't understand his point about the charm of waffle house.
This is how I explain my refusal to learn anything about the varieties and nuances of "good coffee". If I learned to appreciate good coffee, would I still be able to enjoy common dinner coffee? I fear not.
I'm fairly sure I have a well-above-average ability to appreciate actually-good coffee and actually-good pizza—but am also genuinely happy with the bad stuff, even though I'm entirely aware it's bad (within reason—I've had a couple gas station cups of coffee that weren't just bad, but wrong, and I wasn't able to finish them, and instant coffee usually gets a polite "no thanks" from me, but if Folger's or Kirkland Ground or whatever is what you've got, I'll be truly grateful to have it)
I'm not that way with wine and beer. I don't like bad wine or beer at all. I will turn it down or just drink it to be polite, not enjoying it a bit.
I think the difference is I never liked bad wine or beer, while I started out liking bad pizza and bad coffee before I learned what the good stuff tasted like. So, you might be safe.
[EDIT] Reflecting more on this, part of it may be that I regard bad coffee and bad pizza as pretty much totally different things from good varieties of the same—I just happen to like both. I don't really consider one a substitute for the other, I guess. Bad coffee is just coffee-flavored... but I like coffee flavor! Good coffee has all kinds of flavors going on. If you're interested in getting into that, I recommend finding a highly-regarded local roaster doing a tasting event—I personally find it much easier to get into a new flavor-related thing, such that I can start to understand it and pick out various notes, if I can do side-by-side tastings of various examples of the thing, all in a short span.
It's similar with beer and wine, I just happen not to like "beer-flavored" or "wine-flavored", the way I do like coffee-flavored coffee or find greasy bread smeared with salty cheese and tomato sauce satisfying even if it's pretty awful—get me the nice stuff that has more going on and I'm in heaven, though.
One of my favorite coffee experiences was on an Amtrak. The cup of coffee was $2. It was served on a Pepsi branded paper tray thing. Carrying it up the narrow staircase was fun. I enjoyed every sip. It tasted like cream and sugar and the coffee my grandma used to make out of a metal tin.
It's a one-way street. You can love cheap poorly brewed coffee but once you have tried better the cheap stuff becomes undrinkable. Like going from a touch tone back to a rotary dial phone. Impossible.
Until my early mid 20s I never like coffee at all. Then I tried double cream and sugar coffee, then milky cappuccinos, then massive syrupy sweet Starbucks.
After years of "acclimatizing" I thought I'd branch out. I bought a grinder, fresh coffee beans, a scale, French Press, 16:1 ratio. I went black and never went back.
Coffee made well from fresh beans freshly ground has a sweetness a caramel like after-taste. Very little bitterness (comes from brewing too long) and can surprise even those who pile on milk and sugar or even salt to mask its bitterness.
All that fancy coffee prep still doesn't give you what a good diner coffee delivers though: a warm hug after a long night, or hanging with friends, or a big family breakfast, or talking with a potential soul mate after a first date... or countless other things I associate with drinking coffee in a diner
I don’t know. I make my own espresso drink every morning with locally roasted beans, but about twice a month I got to a cheap diner for breakfast and slurp down 3 cups of their black coffee with a smile on my face.
You can enjoy anything if you try hard enough. I go to great lengths to get the best coffee and prepare it in the best way possible, but I'm still very happy to drink an imperfect cup of coffee. Some of the worst coffee I can imagine is whatever they serve on American Airlines flights. It has such a weird flavor, I'm not even sure it's actually coffee. With all of that in mind, I am looking forward to drinking the next cup of airline coffee that is offered to me ;) It's something different, even if it's different in all the wrong ways.
The trick is to learn to enjoy all coffees for what they are. I'll take gas station murk in a pinch, and I'll drink it black when no options are available. But I also love coffees that are $10-15 per pound. But I usually buy in the $7 range. It's about being content, not being snobby, no matter how much you spend.
Edit: Agreeing with another commenter in this thread that some coffees at gas stations are truly awful and are immediately thrown away. Those aren't legit coffee though, and don't count toward what I said above.
This might be wise advice. I have spent a lot on gear, and I buy bags that are typically around $30/lb, although there are some great blends that can be picked up for around $15/lb.
It has ruined the cheap (Robusta) coffee for me. There are diners that make a great medium roast cup and use Arabica beans.
But the good coffee sure is good, and it’s fun to get familiar with the varieties.
I'd never defend Little Caesar's as amazing pizza but it does exactly what it's supposed to, i.e. hits the spot when you're looking for primal satisfaction of a craving for a greasy pile of dough and cheese. When I want "real" pizza I walk down the street for something Neapolitan or NY-style but if I'm hanging with a large group of friends and feel like pigging out then I see nothing wrong with going all-in for some Deep Deep Dish from LC.
Seconded, cannot relate. They're worth the $6 or whatever but not a penny more. Better than most $6 frozen pizzas, I suppose. They have that going for them.
They're also a good example of this, actually. They'd held their $5 price point for a long time but had gradually been cutting toppings until they were comically bare. Then they introduced a $6 "extra toppings" (or something, I don't recall the way they phrased it) pie that just had the same amount the normal ones used to.
Post-Covid I'm pretty sure the sad-pie price is up to $6, and the actually-has-toppings edition is $7.
In my metro area they increased prices to $7. However, quality has drastically improved. If you haven't tried em recently they are very different than the old thin, taste like nothing, Little Caesars pizzas.
Are they using real cheese nowadays (even bulk processed cheese)? If so, perhaps they have improved. The last time I had one (which was admittedly a long time ago) they were using some kind of "imitation cheese-flavored product" or something along those lines.
I'm bistellar: I love both Star Wars and Star Trek.
But I fully realize that Bladerunner is astronomically better than either of them.
And none of those masterpiees keep me from fully enjoying smutty trash like Space Truckers, or even any of Philip K Dick's horrible random short stories.
The big national brands did a big stealth price hike a few years ago when they took away free delivery. So that $15 pie is now about $25 or $26 by the time you add fees, taxes, and tip.
Checking through old emails from Papa Johns (Garbage pizza, but sometimes you WANT garbage pizza.)
I know it was free delivery at somepoint, but it's hard to pinpoint as prior to 2010 their emails didn't include a broken out receipt, just a total.
But, in 2010 it was $1.99 then soon after went up to $2.50.
In 2019 that was bumped to $2.75.
No orders between late 2019 and early 2022.
Early 2022 it was $4.49, then shortly after $4.79, then bumped to $4.99 in July, where it is as of my last order a few days ago.
Agreed. A good pizza is $20 retail, $8-12 at home.
I think the pizza problem is two-fold. Like Jewish Delis, ethnic Italians are exiting the business and selling the local shops. Instead of working 60 hours a week in the shop, the kids are mortgage brokers and IT guys.
The other issue is that manufactured pizza components are better and cheaper. You can be a lower skill operator and still churn out a mediocre product. So a shitty local shop is using a similar premade dough and mediocre cheese that a chain is using.
> Like Jewish Delis, ethnic Italians are exiting the business and selling the local shops.
that was the problem a generation ago. The new problem is that very few customers now know what good pizza should/could taste like, they're not very "Italian" any more either.
The shrinkflation thing is getting out of hand. Not pizza, but I like those Kaukauna brand almond covered cheese balls. They replaced the 10 ounce product with a 6 ounce one, and then charge 10% more for the smaller ball.
Too bad Liam didn't track the average weight of the slices. I have a hunch that might have tracked down as well.
> That mouth-watering Pizza Hut pie you remember from 1992 isn't all nostalgia—every now and then I find single-location or small-chain joints that make pizza very similar to how I remember those tasting.
100% their pizza has changed from the 90's. There is a single location in Gettysburg that I ate at twice and LOVE it - Tommys Pizza on Steinwehr Ave. They even have the textured red plastic soda "glasses" that Pizza Hut used. Solid old school Pizza Hut.
> The biggest thing I have noticed is the decline in the amount of sauce put on slices. I’m sure this is a cost-saving measure, but the overall quality of your average slice in the city has definitely suffered.
Isn't cheese more expensive than tomato sauce? Why would the restaurants skimp on a cheaper ingredient (tomatoes) instead of more expensive (cheese)?
this is not a direct answer to your question, but cheese quality varies more than tomato quality, and NYC pizza in the inexpensive tier already switched to it's-not-really-cheese a few decades ago, so there is little room for saving except by withholding. Possibly customers want the very visible cheese-like product more than they want the sauce so scrimping on the cheese would turn more customers away?
Hello, I am the maker of the website. I'm sorry to hear it's crashing some browsers, I'll try to figure out what's happening. It's a clean install of wordpress so I'm confused what I did wrong.
The reason there is an odd amount for dollar slice total is that one place had the nerve to charge me tax ($1.09). I concede that the quality at Joes has gone down over the years. I am closely noting the recommendations in this thread, and I am very relieved to no longer have to eat bad pizza just to add it to the map.
Hey, I hosted the source data in a BI tool I work on, Perspective - it provides a lot of the same functionality and I recreated a few of the views from your site as an example. Repo is here - hope you don't mind I thought you may find it useful!
I was curious about the data analysis tool you used, and I looked at their pricing page [1], to find that they're charging $200 to $300 per month for individual use. Is that correct? or are there other options I'm missing?
Surprised to see Joe's on Carmine but not Pizza Suprema on your list.
Having stayed in NYC the last few months, the former produced a couple of the worst non-dollar slices I've eaten, yet the latter was just as insanely good as it was when I stayed there in 2013 (top spot on Slice Harvester). These two are not in the same universe.
Visit crown heights pizza. I’ve likely had a solid half of the pizza places in Brooklyn, and it’s among my favorites and seemingly never mentioned, I suppose because it’s relatively new and has a boring name.
I'm from NYC and call it "plain" or "cheese." "Regular" makes me think too hard as to whether the "New York thing" is to say "regular" or "plain." It's also a lot of syllables.
A similar phenomenon occurs with waiting "in [a/the] line" vs "on [a/the] line." I think I say either, but I'm "supposed to" say "on line."
I'm not a New Yorker, but a New York food person I follow has a small rant about how people obsess about the best NYC slice, but that the real point of NYC pizza is that it's available everywhere in the city, like that you are never far from a good NYC slice --- so that the idea of seeking out particular slices kind of misses the point.
NYC'ers: how bad is that take?
(None of this is to say that it's illegitimate for New Yorkers to have opinions about whether the NYC slices they happen to be near, or were near before, are better than the others --- in the same sense as there are Italian Beef rivalries in Chicago.)
Honestly, a solid take! It’s more of an optimization problem — find the best balance of quality, proximity, and price, and you’ve got your favorite slice shop. If you’re at a friend’s or a loved one’s, that solution changes, and you begin to associate the flavor of that slice with them and their home. Sometimes it’s worth it to make a trip out to one of the pizza Meccas—Lucali, Joe’s on Carmine, L&B Spumoni Gardens, etc.—but more often than not, you’re set with your local slice.
Unless you live in Downtown Brooklyn, where there is no good pizza. Then you’re just fucked.
> Unless you live in Downtown Brooklyn, where there is no good pizza. Then you’re just fucked
There used to be a place in the Atlantic center food court that deep-fried their pizza base. It was unconventional, but pretty great. Unfortunately it closed somewhere last year I think.
meh both are true. The thing is, pizza and bagels and halal course through NYC veins like croissants and baguette in Paris. So there's gonna be discount-pizza and convenience-pizza, but also expensive and artisanal pizza. Often in the same block!
Uniquely to NYC:
- millions of NYers rarely or never cook
- melting pot of cultures, driving authenticity and the second generation driving fusion
- NYC has a wide range of incomes, driving everything from amazing illegal corner tamales to $1000/pp "experiences" and everything in between
- NYC is a destination and people work to live - elsewhere you save-up to move to NYC. You don't "save-up" in NYC to go something else, you just move and stop blowing your money on rent, food, etc.
- the food-heavy neighborhoods have an unbelievable number of restaurants. You can cite statistics and even walk the streets, but it's not until you see Google Maps that it really hits you. Let's say you live in LES/EV, you can easily have 500 restaurants in walking distance, with turnover so fast that you can't even eat in all of them, let alone other neighborhoods.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad take, but I would disagree. It’s kind of like any sports debate where you argue about who is the best or greatest of all time. You’re splitting hairs, but it’s still a fun debate.
Also even at the level of your local places, after eating the amount of pizza you do in New York you can tell small differences in quality such that you will seek out specific places in a certain radius.
I think you're spot-on. Naturally, people from NY are going to have their favorite spots (just like everyone else, everywhere, for anything). Those preferences, though, come from many experiences over time. For an out-of-towner who isn't a NYC pizza connoisseur, practically any spot is going to give you a solid experience representative of the NYC pizza scene. The overall consistency of quality in the city is something that you just don't find in most places.
I'd go as for to say that looking for "the best" NYC pizza is not what you want to do (at least, not for your first NY pizza slice!). Experience just how good an average slice is; if you're not blown-away, at least it's not "the best" and the disappointment won't be as great.
One last point is that "the best" might refer to something very specific. Atop many "best pizza (in the US)" lists is Frank Pepe's in New Haven, CT. While their pizza is very good, nearly every writeup is specifically talking about their white clam pie.
I find that more true for bagels than pizza. Some bagel places are better than others but I don't find much value in crossing the city vs. just going to the best place in your neighborhood.
But pizza's a totally different story for me. First off there's no single "real" point - people like what they like and there's no reason people have to have the same kinds of interest.
I have always and will continue to always travel large distances through NYC to enjoy the pizza places I like. There are clear differences - both in style and quality.
When I'm in a pinch and want pizza, sure. I won't go far. But I personally find the difference between your average place down the block and a sought out destination huge. And if I have the time and energy I'd much rather experience my preferred places.
True for the most part. It is arguable that brick oven or coal oven slices taste different and better. Also, 'premium' slices like Lucali’s might offer superior ingredients (particularly the cheese)
> ...the real point of NYC pizza is that it's available everywhere in the city
I have fam on the Upper East Side and it's not an area with a lot of pizzerias (and definitely not many slice joints). There is a ton of great pizza in the city (and the surrounding Jersey burbs), but you do have to travel a bit for it sometimes even if you live in the city.
Obsessing about the best of any food item is annoying. Food is far too subjective. It's also generally dumb to think one city has a monopoly on a particular food item. I get that there's some obvious regional varieties like gulf shrimp and NYC water.
This is why the current restaurant reviews all suck. What I want is:
IMO what do most people do when talking about restaurants, especially in a group? Someone brings up restaurant X and THEN they say "I usually get dish X, but sometimes Y and Z." and then someone ELSE says "nah, don't get X there, go to restaurant A to get that. But I do like the Z they make there", and then someone ELSE has a different opinion like "oh you like X at A, have you tried X at C?".
The thing that's funny is that everyone has these opinions, and often they are pretty strong. Everyone is a critic.
And yet here we are after SquareWhatever and Google reviews and 20 years of faceyspaces and food instragram porn and we still can't get a decent response to some google thing like "best thai duck curry" (my benchmark dish for a thai restaurant, sorry cute ducks, but you are delicious in red curry sauce).
So why isn't there a site that reward people ranking their "top 5 places to get X dish" or top 5 places for cuisine style X", and then you can ask your social network "where should I get duck curry"?
And it tells you something like:
1) Thai Bistro Bubba (liked by 10 friends: molly peter jason)
2) Sing My Thai (like by 8 friends: blahg blah blah)
Maybe not even need people to have a ranking. Just track who leaves a good review about dish X on restaurant R. Cross ref the style.
Gamification of common dishes/styles shouldn't be that hard. People LIKE reviewing food, and telling people about it.
The economic tiers are a bit hard to do though.
And my frustration with a lot of reviews is that people seem to care about ambience and service a lot more than I do. Ambience is like 5% of an eating experience to me. Service? Well as long as the service is average with respect to demand and staffing, who cares, so maybe 10%. Other 85%? How it tastes (... with respect to how much it cost).
Square was close, but their gamification turned into badges.
And all restaurants are basically 3.5 to 4.5 on google. And places that I KNOW are far different in quality vary by maybe .1 to .2, if it's accurate.
The real tragedy is that the rapacious companies like UberEats and the like that are a pox on the takeout industry have all this info, and they probably won't release it. They have the orders, so they have the popularity, and tons of stuff like who will pay the most to have it delivered the most far.
Anyway, and I would LOVE a filter like "remove chain restaurants" or "show only better than chains". I would love to know if my friends or a trusted group of people had a floor for burritos to not bother if it's worse than Chipotle, which is not an astronomically high bar, but it is a good universal measurement.
Like this guy's data should not be in some one-off site. I've also see an chicago burrito site.
And as others have shown, I don't want a ranking of THE BEST in a city. I want a ranking of "pretty darn good" and a group to choose from.
Restaurants have it so hard. They kind of plop down and hope people come to them, but the people don't know what a restaurant does well. They do "Italian". great. Restaurants might do X better than Y, but the knowledge of that is so limited and fragmented. Open some sub-markets for specific dishes, and it might raise the overall quality of that, kind of like what has happened to the NYC slice of pizza, which is so universal over such a large number of people in an area, that it rose to an art that is well distributed and practiced.
I want that for a LOT of other dishes. Of course it should exist for the burrito, the hamburger. And especially for red duck curry.
There is this in Chicago. It's called LTHForum. It's a PHPBB, not a startup with an app. It's a big enough deal that restaurants that get the LTH seal of approval frame it.
I used to live above Best Pizza (Williamsburg) and lived there when they opened. In my opinion, the best heuristic for good pizza is just the quality of tomatoes they use. San Marzano or Roma for the east coast, but on the west coast you have a ton of local options. I'm not saying you can't have good pizza from processed tomato sauce, I'm just saying that a place that cares about the quality of tomatoes also cares about the quality of their pizza.
A lot of quick order places will just have the cans visible. A great way to experiment with pizza is to just experiment with local tomatoes. I never wanted to become a pizza snob, but living on top of one of the most quality pizza joints in town and knowing the guys there and their favorite spots... well... now i am.
Here's a basic recipe from Frank. Anyone can make extremely high quality pizza at home by following his advice: https://youtu.be/whnvQBhXh3A
The funniest thing that happened there was probably when this interested guy was asking 'the locals' how we liked it, and what was popular... we found out a week later that he was very probably this NYT food reviewer: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/dining/reviews/09under.ht...
I finally got to try Frank Pepe's a while back, having never visited New England before at all, so it was also my introduction to New Haven style, period.
I'd previously thought the idea of a "tomato pie"—just sauce with a little parmesan, no other cheese, no toppings really—seemed kinda crazy. Like, I was willing to try it, since that's one of a couple "classic" pies in the style, and it's well-regarded, so I figured I must be wrong, but I couldn't reckon how that'd work out well.
It all came down to the quality of the sauce, and mostly to the quality of the tomatoes. And boy was I wrong. That sauce was absolutely enough to hold up an entire pizza (almost) on its own. I mean, damn. I've made some excellent sauces from home-grown San Marzanos (I know, I know, I don't have the volcanic soil or whatever, but they were good) but this was next-level. So much complexity when, as far as I could tell, there was hardly anything in the sauce other than the tomatoes.
i also lived around the corner from best pizza from their first year and frequented there. (though my true love was saltie.) sometimes frank experimented with the dough/bake method and asked what i thought, friendly people. i love their sicilian. rip bill
Uff... yea. I think Bill and I might have been the two biggest bike nerds in the neighborhood. I always wanted to join him on RAGBRAI. Sadly, I waited too long.
My point is that along the west coast, passionate pizzerias have more direct access to tomato growers, and might just be using fresh tomatoes rather than canned tomatoes. It's pretty safe to say that along the east coast, most tomatoes are going to be canned, so they'll be easier to spot.
This is a fascinating list. No Mama's Too, no Prince St, no L'Industrie, no F&F. All of which are probably my top 4 for slices. Scarr's is there though, which rounds out my top 5.
I don't eat a lot of pizza personally but I do love a good slice. What I love about New York isn't necessarily that we have the best pizza (although we do have places that are in the running for the best), but that the average quality is so damn high. You don't get a lot of overly doughy, bad cheese, bad sauce BS unless you frequent dollar slice shops.
> You don't get a lot of overly doughy, bad cheese, bad sauce BS unless you frequent dollar slice shops.
I've eaten at plenty of dollar slice places and honestly find them adequate for the price. I think I've only ever had one terrible slice, ever - and it wasn't a dollar slice place. I was unsurprised when the place closed shortly after.
As someone who lives in the outer edge of an Outer Borough, my experience is somewhat different - most slice places close fairly early (10 pm on average in my area, slightly later on weekends) and long before bars do. As a consequence, my go-to when out and about is a chopped cheese from the local deli/bodega.
I lived above L'Industrie for a year in 2018-2019, and I would say that it's very, very good. However, it's possible that Emmy Squared is just as good (can highly recommend Mama's Too as GP mentioned).
I'm almost reluctant to share these recommendations online because then those places will become even more crowded, but maybe they will instead expand their businesses and bring their business even closer to me now. One can hope.
emmy squared is a franchise now, they have them all over dc, ny etc.
i have never been to their WB location, but the original one on clinton was very good. their burger is also amazing. mama's too is very similar to prince street right? it looks good but is a bit out of the way.
I live close to l’industrie and am both happy for massimo and bummed for myself that it’s gotten so popular. I miss being able to get a slice without waiting in line for a super long time, but I agree, maybe the top slice in the city.
i live near it also, i remember going in when it was the little shop and you could just get a slice without the loudspeakers. the pizza has gotten a bit better since then too, and they didnt serve sandwitches back then
I really love the plain round slice. The square can be a little greasy (but I see it as more a once in a while treat) but the round is a perfect modern neopolitan/new york hybrid.
They're perfectly legitimate spots. F&F is superior to nearly any place in the city, L'Industrie is fine. The others are also fine. Yes they're touristy, but so what?
Outer-borough superiority is a myth. Most local outer-borough places are simply bad. This includes all the usual suspect neighborhoods: Belmont, Pelham Bay, Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, most of Staten Island, etc. The good places are the exception in the outer boroughs, just as they are in Manhattan.
The link's list looks decent to me but it's not because of the geography.
I didn't say they were illegitimate. They are certainly pizza spots. Acting like it's not a good list because the poster didn't go to the top 5 most famous tourist traps for pizza is just indicating more on your part.
>"Outer-borough superiority is a myth. Most local outer-borough places are simply bad. This includes all the usual suspect neighborhoods: Belmont, Pelham Bay, Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, most of Staten Island, etc. The good places are the exception in the outer boroughs, just as they are in Manhattan."
I didn't say all the places in the outer-boroughs were inherently better. I said a list where the individual actually went to the outer-boroughs is more qualified in my opinion. I don't really care what someone thinks about pizza if they just went to the top 5 places that they saw on instagram. I also don't really care about your opinion on pizza too. Oh you went to pelham bay and didn't get a good slice at the joint you chose? Seems more like a you problem. Maybe make some friends, talk to the locals. I grew up in an outer-borough and I know the good spots in my neighborhood and the bad. Seems like you have difficulty navigating these things. Sorry about that.
You’re dismissing a very legitimate quality difference in inner vs outer boroughs. There’s like 3 or 4 notable places in outer Brooklyn (s/o krispy pizza) that can compete with the dozens of incredible slices in inner Brooklyn.
I’ve spent less time in Queens, but it seems Queens really does have a lot of great food outside of the hotspots.
Here's my take... if the pizza place isn't covered in little league baseball team portraits and autographed photos from the 90s and earlier, I don't want to hear about it. And who suddenly made it a contest about where there's more better pizza? And since when did Brooklyn become an inner borough? oh since you moved here and decided you needed to find the 'best slice'? Here's a suggestion, go find a new yorker and ask them to take you to their favorite pizza place where they grew up. Go do that, and then tell me how fucking amazing inner brooklyn is. The point isn't that L'Industrie isn't good. The point is that if all you do is go to popular pizza places, because that's what's popular, you don't really get what's awesome about NYC pizza. I'm glad you enjoy the food. But what makes NYC Pizza what it is, is the fact that everyone knows a good spot where they are from. It's all over the city, but folks like you gotta make lists.
Oh, and you heard that Queens has good food too? Wow, we've got Pete Wells over here! Share more secrets.
> And who suddenly made it a contest about where there's more better pizza?
But this is a thread about pizza. It’s a guy who tried 400 slices of pizza. You think he only tried 400 slices because his kids played on a little league team? So that’s my take. In no way am I saying Williamsburg is objectively better than Bay Ridge in all aspects of life (if anything I’d say the opposite I’d probably never live in Williamsburg), which for some reason you took from my post. I’m saying the pizza tastes better to a person who doesn’t have an emotional attachment to some other place.
> It's all over the city, but folks like you gotta make lists.
You seem very confused about the post you’re commenting on. It’s a list. I mean, it’s a map, but for all intents and purposes it’s a list. It doesn’t capture anything that you seem to care about when it comes to slice shops. It actually only seems to note price which is perhaps the shallowest metric out there.
Also yeah, Ill go ahead and say elmhurst has better food than Bensonhurst just to see what your reaction is lol.
It is a thread about pizza, I'm not sure how that implicitly becomes a pizza-ranking contest, but I think you are making my point for me. Do you think I only went to those places because I had kids that played little league sponsored by the pizza place? So confused by your assertion. You are trying to turn everything into an ordinated list because you lack meaning in your life, and I'm sorry for you about that.
>"Also yeah, Ill go ahead and say elmhurst has better food than Bensonhurst just to see what your reaction is lol."
It's difficult to notice inflation living in NYC because everything is just expensive. If a coffee or a slice of pizza or a bagel goes up by 20%, that's less than a buck on average, and prices among those products already vary by a lot more than buck. So it's never going to be a shocking increase. Or even noticeable. Combine that with the resignation that most New Yorkers have to the fact that shit is just expensive, and it's hard to really feel an impact from all this inflation that the media has been blaring about for a year. Am I spending slightly more day-to-day than I did a year or two ago? Probably, but I'd be hard-pressed to prove it. I guess it's more obvious if you make a chart!
I am just always broke. But yes, families are likely purchasing many of the same items at the same locations each week and can both see and feel the difference. But the vast majority of people I know in NY are single or childless and they seem, like me, to consider their paycheck forfeit to the city and it's infinite offerings.
A fun project could be to quantify how much less pepperoni toppings, NY pizzerias have been putting on pizza. Train a CV model to detect what a slice is, what a pepperoni topping is. Then feed it public pictures of NY pizza over the past 10 years. An interesting result would be something like "NY pizzerias have been putting 16% less pepperoni on pizza". This would totally get news traffic and generate some buzz, and be a practical example of non-price inflation.
This list is a bit idiosyncratic like one guy’s personal tastes. A lot of far away inconvenient locations. Personally I would suggest going to the fan favorites like scarr’s and L’Industrie instead. Bleecker Street is in the intersection of these strategies
I find the perceived sensitivity to food pricing, especially in high income areas like NYC, interesting.
The author points out that in 8 years, the average cost of a slice of pizza has hardly moved, but the amount of sauce on them has been reduced as a cost cutting measure.
Would a pizza place really see reduced traffic if they kept the same recipe and raised their price another $0.55 to compensate for inflation?
I stopped eating out almost entirely because throughout the 2010s, I feel like the probability of receiving an acceptable quality meal kept declining.
I would much rather pay $25 (or more) per meal that is good 99% of the time than pay $15 for a meal that is good 80% or 60% or 40% of the time.
Obviously, I am sure restaurant operators know their business, and maybe it just is not economical for prepared food to be good 99% of the time at a price that sufficient sales can be made.
Maybe unpopular opinion: NJ has better pizza on average, although you can find better pizza in NYC if you're looking for something specific. Just my opinion obviously.
Not a native Chicagoan here, but lived in the area for quite a while.
Chicago has not one but three distinct styles of pizza, the deep-dish which many think of as "Chicago style", the thin-crust with a relatively thin (compared to deep-dish, anyway) layer of sauce, cheese, and meats, and the square-cut tavern style.
All three are superior to anything the East Coast has to offer, IMO.
The deep-dish is really a cheese pie and has nothing to do with pizza. The thin crust has the texture of the local newspapers. Square cut is only found in taverns and has been cooking all day in such.
The good NYC pizzas are heaven compared to anything Chicago offers.
It is anyway possible to find pizza in NYC. If rare. There is distressingly much Chicago whatever it is, besides.
The best pizza I ever had was off a cart in Perugia, Umbria, in the '90s. It had potato slices, parmesan spears, green olive oil, and crunchy salt. You may doubt, but it was very much pizza. The crust makes the pizza.
Been living in New York for the past 20+ years. Sadly, inflation has diminished the quality and quantity of the average corner pizza shop's slice. Yes, the Artichoke Basil slice the author refers to is much more expensive, but it's also bigger than the average slice of pizza in NYC - and the quality of ingredients seems better. The $1 slice shops (now more like the $1.50 slice shops) live on low margin and high volume. I can attest that it's great when you're in a hurry and just want to get something in your system. For quality pizza slices, well, you're just going to have to pay $3-$5 for a slice nowadays ($1 or more for toppings).
Yeah an Artichoke artichoke slice costs like $7 I think in Park Slope rn but it's a lot more filling than the $5.50 white slice I got last night from a mom and pop shop a block away.
I found my favorite pizza places through him, I really liked his taste. Unfortunately a lot of the places on that list have either closed down or changed.
It looks like the price of pizza has been steadily increasing while the quality going (somewhat?) down. I believe this fits the definition of inflation. Do you remember a year (longer?) ago, all major news sources were telling us that the inflation was only temporary? I wonder why nobody put together a web service that “gives us our memory back”, so that we could make better assessment of various news sources going forward and make better decisions as a result?
I have etched into my brain the one where our president showed his seeming contempt for his countrymen by insinuating that we could believe such a boldface lie about inflation.
“Talk of inflation,... the overwhelming consensus is that it’s going to pop up a little bit then go back down.”
I lived in Manhattan for the last year, and lived within train distance as a child, and it's pretty striking how much changing economics affect what you can get.
Notice that all the slices are plain CHEESE or some variant of it (you can get it with no sauce, or no cheese too!)
I can't get a mushroom or veggie slice anymore at so many places? Feels like a recipe for malnutrition and weight gain.
If you ever get a chance, try to grab a pie from Chrissy’s Pizza (no store, made in a home oven in BK, have to follow on insta for when pies can be ordered). For slices, NY Suprema good as well
And some of the best slices can be found across the river in NJ - just travel up Bloomfield Avenue into the Caldwells and there are great slice shops all over.
One is an objective thing (boomers are those born between 1945 and 1962) and the other is subjective (Williamsburg, Billyburg, Hipster Doofus Land) labeling.
The first isn't the case (I was born after 1962) and the second is a matter of opinion.[0]
But please. Do continue to pile on. I don't want to take away one of your few pleasures in life.
Toodles!
[0] Here's another one for you: If you can't put New York, NY after your address, you don't live in New York.[1] Have at that one too, friend.
[1] As a NYC native, I note that I've lived in every borough except Stagnant Island (for obvious reasons) over the past 50+ years. As such (no Dunning-Kruger[2] effect necessary, can you make such a statement?), I am entitled to make such pronouncements.
"The biggest thing I have noticed is the decline in the amount of sauce put on slices. I’m sure this is a cost-saving measure, but the overall quality of your average slice in the city has definitely suffered."
Yes, that's generally what happens with a _stupid_ "cost-saving measure", whicb our culture defends to the hilt for some reason.
There's ways to cut costs without compromising quality, called a _smart_ cost-saving measure, but our culture isn't about quality anymore, is it? It's all about saving/making money, but money doesn't taste very good, does it? I'd rather spend a little more for a quality piece of pizza than save money eating something that tastes more like cardboard than before.
Everyone is obsessed with NYC but these types of slices can be found in all the major east coast cities and is definitely one thing I miss about Philly. I'm in LA now and you'd think with how many Italians there are around here there'd be a higher standard but nope.
Philly and New Haven are basically the only 2 other cities that have solid “pizza cultures”. If you go to Baltimore, DC, or Boston you can’t get anything close to an NY slice without traveling significantly out of your way. Even then, the ubiquity of the NYC slice shop can’t be matched
Do you have some kind of extension like an ad blocker? It’s fine in Firefox and Safari on a clean install so I’m wondering whether there might be some issues related to how large the page is or possibly a video driver problem.
It crashes for me on macOS. I have a couple of password manager extensions and React Developer Tools installed. I would not be surprised if it's LastPass.
Edit: Interestingly, Chrome flashes a couple of times too when I scroll down to the section of the page with the Carto map plugin. I can see when I inspect the DOM that there's supposed to be an iframe there, but it looks Chrome is just killing the iframe rather than crashing to desktop.
Safari hangs but does not crash when it gets to Carto. So something is screwy with that map plugin.
Those two, old posts might be of some value for people interested in pizza. For costs, I estimate the cost of ingredients for my pizza for one person at about $1 per pizza, that is, a lot less than single slices in NYC.
I agree with most of the comments in the thread about NYC, but would like to point out that there are some really great old school pizza places in Nassau County (Long Island, just east of NYC) that rival any NYC pizza place.
Anecdotally, I've felt the same way. Didn't properly record it.. but, slices these days in NYC (and outside) are definitely lacking in sauce lately. Some places even feel like they're cutting on salt and oil too.
I will add that the quality also highly depends on when you go. Generally, the busier it is, the worse the quality.
The author states that Joe's is one of the better ones, but I think the quality has gone down too. I was there in 2014, 2017, and 2022. Digging up my photos to review the sauce amounts, but I felt 2022 was very lackluster to previous memories.
Native from Ozone Park, still living here. I'm excited but not surprised to see Ozone Pizza AND New Park on that list. This neighborhood along with Howard Beach to the south was mostly Italian immigrants and their descendants so good Italian food was/is a staple. Of course it was full of mobsters and is the Goodfellas neighborhood; parts were even filmed around here for authenticity, check out Nier's Tavern. Into the late 90's and early 00's you could still walk into a local joint like Ozone or Romeo's and sometimes in the corner would be a table of well dressed older gentlemen speaking Italian. And no one sat near them because you knew not to.
New Park is a local landmark and its been around for decades, my father ate there as a kid. They have this unique old school slice with lightly sweet sauce and the bottom is salted giving a wonderful balance of flavor to the ingredients. They don't make frilly slices so no buffalo or vegetable slices, just standard toppings. It's big with JFK workers and cops so the place is busy and volume is high and they tend to under-cook the pizzas so ask for it well done. And even if its under cooked and slightly doughy its still damn good.
Ozone Pizza is not only good but cheap. I can order a pie, usually half mushroom/eggplant and half pepperoni, with an order of garlic twists that comes with this amazing marinara sauce for $23 and change. Delivered. Domino's cant compete in price or quality. They also have a really good buffalo slice based on a white slice. Before I stopped eating a little too rich I used to walk over and grab a buffalo slice and a beef patty with cheese n pepperoni (another NYC staple not many know of - take a fresh Jamaican beef patty, slice it open, cover with mozzarella and top with pepperoni then bake. see also beef patty on a roll with cheese - perfect drunk food)
Not on the list but I'm also a fan of Dani's House of Pizza in Kew Gardens. I love their signature pesto slice which is usually sold out. A few times my brother and I would get sick of waiting for a pesto slice so we'd order ahead and pick up a full pesto pie. Their regular slice is very good with a sweet sauce. During the summer I sometimes walk or cycle up to forest park, walk around until I'm hungry then go to Dani's for a pesto and regular slice. I usually sit on a bench at the LIRR station around the corner and dig in.
I actually prefer my pizza with less sauce, or preferably white pizza (I know, sacrilege) either the garlic butter variant or the ricotta variant. I've never had pizza in NYC, but favorites have always been Rizzo's and Roman Delight in the northern Philly suburbs. Both great places that I've eaten at hundreds of times. I'm sure NYC has good pizza, but Philadelphia is no slouch.
Yeah, while not my favorite, Sal & Carmines is great. Only other truly great slice joint on the UWS is Freddie's (which is phenomenal). A new-ish place, Mama's Too on 106th, isn't too bad either.
Spent my adolescence going to S&C's nearly day of summer vacations. My closest childhood friend and I always grabbed two slices and sat at the table directly behind the column. Even though the original proprietors have passed on, the cheese slices are still world-class. The flavor of nostalgia probably enriches the sauce and cheese, but Sal and Camrine's remains the slept-on great slice in Manhattan.
Yeah unfortunately sal passed on maybe 7 years ago? But his grandson now operates it and was working under sal for quite a while before sal passed, and I didn't really notice a difference in the quality of a slice after the grandson took over. Unfortunately I moved to Colorado a few years ago and it's impossible to get even a mediocre slice here, let alone my favorite of all time
Dollar slices aren't just a slice of pizza for a dollar, they're a different business model focusing on just sheer volume. Joe's has at least 3 employees (cashier, guy taking your order and reheating the slice, and guy making the pizzas), plus prep people in the back, and 4+ different pies, and 20+ seats. The dollar place I go to has 2 guys, they don't reheat it, any toppings are just added onto your slice not actually cooked into the pie, no seats. I'm ignoring differences in quality/quantity of ingredients because I've had some great dollar slices, but also some abysmal ones.
I can't turn up my spreadsheet just this second but I did something similar when I worked in Manhattan. I did 54 slices. My big takeway was that I really don't like Joes and that I will die on the hill that Pizzeria Suprema, despite being touristy , is the best slice that I've had in Manhattan.
That's a lot of pepperoni over only 9 years. Have never visited New York, but I'm sure the pizza is fine enough. But is it as good as a any neopolitan pizza you can get in any PNW city? Anyone?
Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland have pretty good, though expensive pizza.
Since the pandemic, large pizzas have all gone up to $11 from the chains, so I have just started buying $4/5 frozen pizzas (coupon or on sale), or the $6 take home and bake pizza from the grocery store deli.
It’s pricy drunk and high food. I would never seek it out sober but they disperse oil throughout the slice in a way that’s really satisfying if you’re under the influence.
Excludes the dollar slices, but oddly enough I prefer those over the more expensive ones. I think it's cause they're less oily. Do they have fake cheese or something?
Speaking of Bay Ridge pizzerias circa 2009, there was a place on the corner of Bay Ridge Ave and Colonial called Lil Nino's (?) which served the absolute worst slices I've ever had. They essentially just plated up what was obviously frozen, microwave pizza.
Their whole game plan seemed to be to appeal to the high school students in the area based on their location and the fact that they had a couple of Xbox 360s and TVs you could use. It was cool at first, but most of us just went back to picking up a couple of slices at Rocky and Nicky's across the street and going home to play Modern Warfare. I'm not sure they lasted more than six months to be honest.
Curious how the dollar slices added up to a non-whole dollar amount. The name would imply that a dollar slice is $1. Is $.99 also considered a dollar slice?
What's great about pizza in New York is the spontaneity. After a night out there will always be somewhere nearby with a pretty good slice of pizza. The best pizza I had while living in New York isn't any better than the best pizza I've had in Seattle but the average slice was much better.
There's so so many places honestly. I could rhyme off a half dozen more on this list that some new yorker would say is "the best".
But coming from out of town your expectations are probably sky high. If pizza is high on your list, go for gold. It's a fun thing to do in the city. Also you need to treat both categories separately - slice, and whole pie. different game.
Yup, that's pretty par for the course at most places that sell by the slice. Dollar slice places now mostly charge $1.25-$1.50 for a plain cheese slice.
Seems ridiculously cheap to me. here in Phoenix, there are 2 restaurants near me that do by the slice, both around $5. Most restaurants don’t offer it.
I have only spent a month or so in NYC working a decade back, and at the time every thing was more expensive than home except pizza. I think every region probably has its cheap food for the working class. Here it’s tacos, there it was cheap slices.
How big are the slices near you? Im assuming large-ish like a NYC slice, where 6 slices will make the pie. If you are paying $5.00 for a slice of cheese pizza in Phoenix, that means a whole cheese pizza would cost $30 USD? That is insanity. Granted I think it would be cheaper if you bought a whole pie, but for dough, cheese and sauce that is still a very healthy profit.
I agree every region has its own good cheap food. Interesting stuff.
Not sure if I'm missing anything in your comment, but the study purposely excludes dollar slices. You can find a lot of 1$ slices in nyc, and they usually taste pretty good!
There are many, it's practically it's own category of slice. There's definitely a quality hit, but still a great value. And they churn through them so much that you're quite likely to get one fresh out of the oven - which in my opinion beats a better slice that's been sitting there for a few hours.
The $1 slice nearest chelsea flea market is the best I've had.
The obsession with "best NYC pizza" is funny to New Yorkers. Pizza is usually not a food that you plan for it and go somewhere far to have it. The best pizza is the one nearby. They're all good. Just enjoy it and stop with the FOMO
oh i've been frequenting lucali for ages and it is worth the trouble for me, especially the calzone. i'm nearby and it's not hard to time it or chill at a cafe or bar. not many good no corkage byob places of that caliber either.
