[Sca-cooks] Pizza was Re; Philly Cheese Steak

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach AF Murphy:
>South Street for pizza?? Um, no. You can get pretty good fish, though...
>  You get pizza at little independent shops, which means you really have
>to know each one to know how good it is. And more and more, especially
>in midtown, are starting to destroy the stuff for all their transplanted
>customers... thick crusts, gloppy sauces, stuff that doesn't belong on
>any self respecting pizza... (I'm going to pretend I didn't read posts
>about canadian bacon, pineapple, jalapenos or bleu cheese on what
>otherwise sound like real pizzas...)

True, people of taste prefer to ignore it when ignorant children
shriek obscenities...

However, you must understand that the search for decent pizza in the
South Street area (it was actually Fulton Street, IIRC) was born more
of geography, expedience, and the random vagaries of Fate, and not
anybody's idea of, "Hey! I know! Let's get some pizza! Why not try
the South Street Seaport?!?"

>Stefan, you have to get to the Cloisters! That's near where I live. But
>here, the pizza isn't half bad, but isn't great, either. Best sour rye
>in town, though...

Good sour rye in many places here, including many parts of Brooklyn,
the Lower East and Upper East Sides of Manhattan... Maspeth,
Queens... etc.

Re pizza, I'm reminded of Robert B. Parker's fictional sentiments on
beer ("the worst beer I ever had was wonderful"; I forget which
Spenser book it's in). It's extremely likely that the worst pizza in
New York is as good as, or better than, much of what is out there in
the rest of the country, with the exception of deep dish pizza,
which, of course, you would get in Chicago. See, deep dish pizza is
probably our local equivalent of other types of pizza elsewhere: it's
almost invariably made by large corporate chains, not hand-stretched,
and generally treated with disrespect even as it is being made; it
loses out both in the recipe (the Stouffer recipe kitchen concept, I
mean) and the technique (mostly made by more or less unskilled labor).

Conversely, the majority of other pizza around here is still more or
less the result of artisan baking, even if many industrialized
shortcuts have been introduced into the process.

Adamantius