(Or, Stuff White People Like #89: Waiting In Line For Pizza.)

My dinner tonight was three slices of what some have called the best pizza in New York City. This, in a city with entire blogs devoted to the pursuit of the perfect slice. When I moved here three years ago I thought my then-boyfriend was boring for wanting plain cheese slices over pepperoni (and constantly berated him for it). But my palate has gradually come around to New York-style pizza, and now I, too, consider the tangy margherita to be Big Apple pizza’s purest and highest expression. Sorry, Mike!

All the same, the vicious Lombardi’s/DiFara’s/Patsy’s/Grimaldi’s/John’s rivalry–perpetuated by the customers, not the proprietors–I don’t get. It’s pizza. Even when it’s bad, it’s ok. (Other foods in the edible-even-when-bad category: ham & cheese sandwiches, burgers, French onion soup. Foods in the truly-godawful-when-bad category, for comparison: coleslaw, clam chowder, any item on a molecular gastronomy tasting menu.) It’s just not that variable, and its individual components are familiar and umami-rich enough to survive even ingredient cost-cutting or a klutzy pie-tosser. The Man knows this, and that’s why the microwave pizza industry is as big as it is.

Don’t get me wrong–Grimaldi’s is good. They know how to season a pie. The tomato sauce tastes fresh and zesty, they go nuts with the garlic, and they use rounds of fresh mozzarella instead of matted blankets of shredded cheese, so there is no deluge of orange oil when you tilt your slice. The crust is crisp, well-flavoured and very, very thin.

Too thin. Come to think of it, that very thin crust isn’t cooked through in the centre, even though the outer edges of the pizza are raised in big, black boils. It’s wet and translucent in each of the three large pies we ordered, and wettest of all, understandably, in the one containing ricotta. I don’t know anything about pizza-making, but it seems to me that the ovens are too hot, if the outside is charred before the centre is even cooked. Now, I love that burnt flavour, but I also know that a slice of pizza, however thin, does not have to go flaccid half an inch past the crust.

The best pizza I can remember tasting was at a pizzeria in Cannes, on a school trip to France when I was 13 years old. It was a margherita with garlic, and it was everything they salivate and bicker about on Chowhound and Serious Eats. And somehow the cooks were turning them out at a quick and steady pace, without hour-long waits for a table. In the south of France, a good-quality tomato sauce is not a lure but a fact of dining out; the best pizza I ever tasted may have been no better than the pies they served across the street, I just didn’t stay in Cannes long enough to find out.

It’s one thing if a restaurant’s popularity suddenly explodes beyond all control, and it’s quite another when an establishment deliberately cultivates the wait as its hallmark. Friends have told me in awed tones of Dom DiFara’s meticulous, laborious pizza-by-pizza construction, and happily waited an hour to be served one. I say: a chef is only as good as his management. If you are waiting an hour to even get a table, and it’s more a result of deliberate understaffing than an insatiable public, then you have been the victim of (a) a gimmick, (b) a chef who is as pigheaded as he is an artisan, and/or (c) your own gullibility. I feel curmudgeonly, because Grimaldi’s pizza, even with its flaws, was pretty tasty. But I maintain that the demand is out of proportion to the quality of the product, and that the pizza oligarchy currently in place in this city is due for a redistribution of power.

If I want a good pizza, served reasonably promptly, I’ll go to Fornino.

Grimaldi’s Pizzeria
19 Old Fulton St., Brooklyn, NY 11201
nr. Front St.
718-858-4300

Fornino
187 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11211
at N. 7th St.
718-384-6004

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