New York

I’m a little behind on the blog, this visit took place at the end of October, and that fact will be important later on, so remember it.

So New York! That most famous of states – well technically not true, it’s a famous city, nobody seems to know much about the state, apart from the fact it contains the city and a bit called “upstate New York”. Bizarrely if you ever meet anyone from New York, they tend to be from “upstate”. Which is a bit of a weird inversion. Weirder still is that a lot of the people who say they’re from New York City are actually from over the river in New Jersey. (Perfectly understandable though, if I was from New Jersey I’d also pretend I was from somewhere else).

The flag:

I tell you what, all these flags are weird, in this one if you can see the close-up, the woman on the right in yellow is blindfolded, and the woman on the left has a tiny little wizard’s hat on the end of her stick.

So anyway, New York is a bit of a weird one, because I had kind of done it before, back in December ’09 – see the entry here but I had been thwarted in my desire to eat Pizza at some famous New York pizzerias due to the long queues and freezing cold. Instead we went to an authentic Jewish diner and had Matzoh ball soup and Pastrami sandwiches, so not a total loss, but it did mean we needed a return visit.

This time, we really wanted to do a trip round notable New York pizzerias. We went with a pizza tour which I would recommend, as it busts you past any queues, and the guide is very informative. It had a nice mix of generally talking about pizzas and the difference in styles and regions, and also the history of pizza (both in Italy and in the USA). In the US, it’s easy to trace the beginning of Pizza since it started at Lombardi’s in Little Italy in Manhattan.

The genesis was in a grocery story a couple of blocks away where Gennaro Lombardi started selling little pizza-pies wrapped in paper in 1905. When the location was moved the coal oven was moved over, and is still in use today. Interestingly the fire (coal-fired I think) is kept burning all the time, all year-round, apart from the week when it’s closed down for a thorough cleaning. That week is after the busiest pizza consumption day (have a guess which that might be……the day of the Superbowl).

The original oven:

The pizza they make here is still very traditional, a full covering of tomato, and huge individual slices of Mozzarella cheese, much closer to the original Italian style of pizza I would think.

Interestingly as well, most of New York’s notable early pizzerias can be traced back to Lombardi’s, either people who worked there (Totonno) or relatives (Patsy’s and John’s).

At Lombardi’s they proudly display a family tree of New York pizza, you can see Lombardi right at the bottom there starting everything else off.

We also were taken to John’s of Bleecker Street – “No slices! Whole pies only!” which is on the tree above and to Pizza Box a mid-50’s establishment that specialises in the type of pizza we’re perhaps more familiar with as being New York Pizza (i.e. heavy on the cheese – huge slices and pizzas the size of dustbin lids). All three were great in their own way.

The tour also made reference to the pizzas of New Haven in Connecticut which we had visited in 2010. So when that came up, we got to feel like the pizza experts. Here’s a photos of some of John’s brick oven pizza, established in 1929 (the type, age and even size of oven are very important to these pizzerias apparently):

So who wins out of Connectictut and New York? I’ve got to say New York. Connecticut has some great pizza, and some really inventive stuff, but I like the style above, you can’t beat that melted cheese.

Anyway though in case you think this blog is all fun and games, I will reference the info at the top about this trip being at the end of October. We were lucky enough to participate in a quite historic weather event, it was the first time in 60 years that it had snowed in NYC in October. Good thing we had planned to be on this 3 hour walking/pizza tour and I was wearing canvas shoes!

So after the tour, we immediately made for Macy’s where I along with hordes of other tourists were buying new (waterproof) shoes and socks…

Richard