The Pizza Post

This Is How You Build a Blogging Community

There is a certain kind of guy, let’s call him the lumpenproletariat foodie, who wants to talk to you about pizza. He can’t wait to start because he’s thought about pizza a lot. He’s eaten a lifetime’s worth of pizza, and during most of that eating he has carefully rehearsed in his head what he is going to say when he finds the right audience. If you are unfortunate enough to find yourself within the parameters of his cone of blather when he begins the discourse in earnest, well…. poor you. You know what to do. We all have our dodges. Mine is to look him in the eye and say, “I don’t care about food”, which is true, but guess what?

I am that guy.

And if you continue to read you are going to listen to me talk about pizza.

Why would you do that? Why would anyone willingly listen to someone else talk about pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, or grilled cheese sandwiches**? These are the dumbest topics. They are inevitable springboards to pontification, generalization, and didactics. Who the fuck cares what anyone else thinks about hot dogs? The answer, of course, is “their friends.”

Your friends will indulge you, and, better yet, close friends might actually care about what you have to say. Really. Friends care what you have to say about pizza not because they care about pizza, but because they care about you.

So here is a test for the Medium community. Do we care enough about each other to write about pizza? I think we do.

This post will be a failure if others don’t say something about pizza in the comments. I recently wrote yet another screed about Medium and declared, once again, that “responses” don’t work, but you know what? The comments have gotten better. You can… kind of… have a conversation in Medium comments. We can at least try.

First Argument: Pizza Impressioning

What we think of as “good pizza” has a lot to do with the pizza we first ate as children. We are, by virtue of the psychological concept of first impressions, predisposed to those slices that conjure the emotions of our earliest experiences of pizza. Add to that the fact that all of your early food memories are based on superior taste buds, and you have a powerful store of pizza prejudice warehoused within your memory.

For me, the normative slice was from King Pizza in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. Here is the hard part. Although I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, my family seldom ate pizza. We had it about once a year. There had to be a perfect confluence of several disparate factors. One was my mom not wanting to cook. The second was that there had to be visitors, usually cousins. The third, and this I can’t explain in any way, is it had to be warm weather. I don’t understand those parameters either, but just as a drone bee knows the humidity, temperature, and angle of light that indicates some strange spot at a specific altitude in the sky where he might get laid, when the stars started to align at our house my brothers and I would begin to say, “Maybe we’ll get pizza”. When we did it was a single pie, cold from the trip from pizza parlor to kitchen. My mother would cut the slices in half and serve them to us. It was a big deal. A very big deal.

One of the first things I did when I reached the age of proto-maturity was take my baby sitting money (I was rich!) and walk myself downtown to buy a slice from King Pizza.

That is the definition of living. That is freedom, man. If you have some money from mowing lawns or baby sitting, you can eat all the pizza you want.

King Pizza was owned by Larry Pizza (a real person, you can read his obituary here) who greeted me by my last name whenever I walked into the shop. He knew my name because he knew my older brothers.

Larry played a game with the kids in town where he would ask you to slap him five. You could slap his hand as hard as possible, but in return he would “slap you five” even harder. It sounds bizarre. I can’t explain it right. This is the kind of “slap me five” where you flip your hand over at the last moment and lay your knuckles into the palm of the other person’s hand. We would try to sting him. You can see in the obituary above that he was a Marine who served in Da Nang, Vietnam. I’m not sure we had it in our power to hurt him. He stung us back. I remember it hurting, but I don’t remember anyone ever getting hurt.

In my teenage years it became cool to disparage King Pizza. It was, perhaps, not good pizza, but all of the best slices I have eaten in my life somehow invoke the slices from King.

If you want an actual description, here goes. It was New York style pizza. The sauce was thin. I don’t remember it being sweet or remarkable in any way. My brother claims the cheese was meager. The crust was good enough that we always ate the heals.

Here is how that natal bias influences me. I believe that the best pizza is served by the slice and reheated. The double cooking of a New York style slice is key to it’s ontological being. I ask for it “not too hot” and always fold my slices. The truth is, I like it pretty hot, but most pizza parlors err on the side of too hot, so my instruction is windage, like asking for a hamburger “very rare.”

Second Argument: Pizza is a Snack, Not a Meal

I held strictly to the idea that “pizza is not a meal” until I experienced parts of the country that don’t serve slices. You know, when you have to drive an hour and half to visit a Pizza Hut, you’re going for a meal.

I like all the pizza. I eat the bad Greek pizza made by Yemenis in Boston. I’ve had the “great” pizza in Providence, New Haven, and Chicago. I’m not against artisan pizza. My brother worked at Otto, but I’m also willing to eat the pizza on the rotating heat racks at Cumberland Farms or 7–11. There are billions of slices of pizza in the world at any moment. Almost all of them are bad. That said, bad pizza is a good thing.

But the slices to remember are slices, and they don’t show up at lunch or dinner time. The great slices are serendipitous. There is a confluence of hunger, weather, and a great slice. The stars have to align. You eat it and some time right before the end you realize that you just hit the jackpot. As the buddhists say, “As soon as you realize it is a great slice, you’ve fucked it up.”

Third Argument: Pizza is Best Eaten Standing Up

I worked at a homeless shelter in Richmond, VA that served a very large dinner crowd. We couldn’t get the guests in and out quick enough because of limited seating and, consequently, ended up with a long line each night. Almost all of the problems at the shelter happened on the dinner line.

During one big meeting where we were trying to a find solution to the problem, one social worker asked, “Why don’t we let people eat standing up?” He was quickly pilloried for voicing this barbaric suggestion, to which he replied “I like to eat standing up.” I concur. I, too, like to eat standing up. Whether it is eating tunafish over the sink or pizza over a trash can, there is something about a vertical disposition that aides digestion and enhances the gastronaut’s enjoyment.

Last: Pizza Places Close to My Heart

All boring pizza discussions eventually devolve into the places where you can get “the best” pizza. “The Best” pizza is a dumb idea. As I pointed out above, the good slice of pizza is created by an alchemy of nostalgia, hunger, weather and just plain luck. I should point out that bad pizza is created by bad pizza makers. None of the pizza places that are close to my heart serve(d) terrible pizza, but remember, there is a lot of pizza in the world and almost all of it is bad.

• King Pizza, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
• Santarpio’s, East Boston

• Sac’s Pizza, Astoria, NY (I think this place went upscale at some point. It was once a regular pizza parlor with strangely unique pizza)
• Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder, Co. I guess it is a tourist trap. That doesn’t matter. I went there and had the pizza pot pie. It was a memorable eating experience.
• The Pizza Parlor that used to be in Cooper Square near St. Marks that had slices heavy on oregano (or was it garlic?).

• Koronet Pizza (we always called it “Mammoth Pizza”), giant slices (not good, but big) on the Upper West Side.

That’s it. That’s what I have to say about pizza. I’m willing to listen. Let me have it.

**I wanted to add “bacon, egg & cheese sandwich” to this list but couldn’t figure out how to do it without screwing the whole sentence up.