NYC Slice
elkue.com
elkue.com
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'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!
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.
I'm just not a fan of how finely they chop the meat at Dalassandro's.
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.
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.
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 think it was the first of those that I did manage to hit, and absolutely lived up to the hype. Probably the best individual slice I’ve ever had.
(Also really enjoy Prince St., haven’t tried Bleecker St. to date.)
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?".
Buffalo HAS GOOD PIZZA! It's called Santora's.
P.S. As far as sandwich shops go though, Reykjavik's Nonnabiti (RIP) was the G.O.A.T.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
You can get cheese and wine made in the US ~ as good as French, but it’s 5x as expensive.
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.
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.
Coffee in Portugal;
Wine in Portugal;
Traditional food in Portugal;
Artisanal pastries in Portugal;
(no “supremacist” views, just pointing out - love good food & epicurism in any country/place I can find it. cheers!)
It looked tasty except for the flies, but I don't think I'm ever going to trust something in Europe that wasn't covered up before it was handed to me
Dragon Pizza there similarly high quality.
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.
(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)
Homeslice or Joe’s?
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.
edit: for crossiants and other treats, A.J. King is my fav -- they supply a lot of the Boston cafes
Kane's for donuts
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.
if you're lucky you have 3-5 in a few block radius, and the "best taco truck in LA" is your favorite out of those
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".
Unless you're in Bed Stuy. Most of the pizza here isn't worth the cardboard it comes in.
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.
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.
Those ratings are bunk.
Sacco Pizza on 9th Avenue & 55th St is an underrated gem and a family business since 1972.
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.
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.
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.
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.
L’industrie really does live up to the hype
If you want to brag about anything you have a much better case with bagels.
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’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?
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 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.
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 understand NYC is the same with Pizza
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.
Starting to think maybe you’ve never been in a deli!
It's true though, good breakfast burritos are still hard to come by here.
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 :'(
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.
Also, my fave place after living in New Haven for a year was technically in West Haven (Zuppardi's) but that's splitting hairs.
https://www.gawker.com/the-pizza-belt-the-most-important-piz...
This has a (in)formal name, The Pizza Belt.
Also I totally agree, North East or bust pizza-wise.
Average pizza slice that we're discussing is according to https://www.nutritionix.com/i/nutritionix/new-york-style-piz... 500+ calories, lots of saturated fat, lots of sodium.
How healthy is it to grow up on pizza?
See USA statistics for obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.
Pizza is relatively benign.
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.
Unless you’re excluding the cheese, this is way off
Glycemic index is vastly different when it’s combined with protein and fat.
It’s not going to have a lot vitamins, but it’s pretty balanced in terms of the carb/protein/fat
You’d do worse eating a plate of white rice with soy sauce.
What does it matter which ingredients people do and do not consider healthy?
It is objectively known that the quantities of bread and mozzarella consumed by most people relative to their lifestyle is unhealthy.
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.
(Sadly, Hi-Fi closed years ago. https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/cambridge-chronicle-tab/20... I was very cross when it was quickly replaced by a vegetarian food startup, and I'm vegetarian. A couple weeks ago, the even more MIT-beloved food place, Mary Chung (which I first heard of as a kid, in stories of MIT hackers), also shut down. https://www.boston.com/community/restaurants/mary-chung-rest... )
FWIW, I think Mary Chung wanted to retire and be done with it.
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.
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.
That kinda goes for most things, really.
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.
Unedited tosh most of it but it does a job !
Someone who gets enjoyment out of a $5 pizza is in an objectively better position than someone who can only get enjoyment out of a $10 pizza. Sorry!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which means it's good drunk food available when the drunks want to eat.
I live 1,000 miles away from the nearest one, but I sure did love a late Saturday night at Waffle House when I lived in the south.
Where I am now, a "109 spicy special,"[0] hot off the grill, a single serving bag of nacho cheese Doritos and Pepsi does the job too.
Gone is the 90s yellow a la carte one. Gone even is the replacement that at least kept the classics on the back.
Now it's $8+ meals, with token hashbrown options at the bottom.
Used to be, you could get a perfectly serviceable meal there for under-$6. E.g. double hashbrowns ($3) + single hamburger ($1) + drink ($1.5).
Now the closest thing to the same meal is double the price. Double hashbrown $5. Single hamburger doesn't exist, and hamburgers start at $6.
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.
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 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.
"$5, hot and ready."
"Is it good?"
"It's HOT and it's READY."
Literally all you can eat + pasta. Dirt cheap. If you're the 'one-meal-a-day' type, is there a cheaper option?
Not sure when they switched to extreme value focus.
That recipe is just focaccia with about half the olive oil, probably replaced by whatever runs off the toppings: https://www.saltfatacidheat.com/fat/ligurian-focaccia
- no stand mixer
- no kneading
- overnight room-temperature rise
- 4:3 flour-water ratio
- dough is dimpled in the pan before baking
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.
Been meaning to try Kenji’s pan pizza recipe. Thanks for jogging my memory.
Ah, come ON: You no doubt know more about pizza than she does!
Moreover it seems that it is common here at Hacker News for people to know a LOT about pizza making!
But, for that poor woman, she is trying! Soooo, try to be kind!!!
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.
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.
Always nice having some frozen dough and sauce handy in the freezer.
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.
Indeed, describes my attempts. Any tips how to succeed in this?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34081087
with some more details in
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34085805
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?
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?
Sauce >> crust >> cheese >> toppings
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.
It’s really obvious to see in NYC.
The same thing happened to bread.
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.
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.
Isn't cheese more expensive than tomato sauce? Why would the restaurants skimp on a cheaper ingredient (tomatoes) instead of more expensive (cheese)?
Too bad Liam didn't track the average weight of the slices. I have a hunch that might have tracked down as well.
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 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.
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 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?
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.
https://prospectiveco.github.io/nyc_slice/
https://github.com/ProspectiveCo/nyc_slice (source) https://github.com/finos/perspective (component)
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.)
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 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.
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.
falco of roberta's fame consulted on their opening. i recommend checking out any restaurant he's helped open (all over the world now).
My reaction to tasting their food was similar to this: https://youtube.com/shorts/ra72I-5t5D0
Downtown Brooklyn has Norm’s and Juliana’s. Sadly the whole area is kind of devoid of commercial activity and restaurants.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
L'Industrie is damn good. Highly recommend Action Bronson's Fuck That's Delicious episode there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOQUUyCRtiE
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.
L'Industrie is the best ny slice in NYC (possibly the world?) as of 2023 IMO
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.
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.
Mama's Pizza two blocks away on Amsterdam & 107th is run by the parents of the guy that runs Mama's Too and is a traditional NYC slice, and delicious.
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.
>"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.
I’ve spent less time in Queens, but it seems Queens really does have a lot of great food outside of the hotspots.
Oh, and you heard that Queens has good food too? Wow, we've got Pete Wells over here! Share more secrets.
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.
>"Also yeah, Ill go ahead and say elmhurst has better food than Bensonhurst just to see what your reaction is lol."
I really don't care!
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 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.
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 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.
The good NYC pizzas are heaven compared to anything Chicago offers.
“Talk of inflation,... the overwhelming consensus is that it’s going to pop up a little bit then go back down.”
https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1485791682532675590?s...
Edit: also, there are quite a few Twitter accounts that focus on content like this, though I wouldn't recommend spending much time on it.
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.
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.
As an old guy, I try to avoid Hipster doofus land^W^W^W Williamsburg as much as possible.
YMMV
I say that not to be mean, but "boomer" has become a slur and I prefer not to be insulted unless it's actually accurate.
I have been in Hipster doofus land[0] in the past few years and most of what I experienced reinforced my stance.
I will continue to try to avoid it.
[0] I'd love to say I made that nickname up, but I didn't. Works for me though.
Edit: Touched on the source of a wonderful moniker.
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.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Dunno why it is not included in this list..
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.
There's a pretty good NYC style pizza place in Maui and it tastes exactly the same.
This spot.
In Philly my favorite is
Also the Jersey shore has a ton of spots.
I’ll have to check out your Philly recs.
I have a bunch of addons and some of them block scripts. No crash.
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.
Pizza is one of my standard food items, and I explained how I make pizza in
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34081087
with some more details in
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34085805
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.
Whew
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.
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.
Jumbo slices FTW!
So, they only counted data from places where the price has gone up and concluded that...the price has gone up.
That said, a lot of dollar slices are now $1.50.
On one side "very bad pizza, low/avg price", on the other side "very good pizza, higher prices".
All the middle, average pizza places with reasonable prices are going out of business or moving to the the bad side.
Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland have pretty good, though expensive pizza.
I worked near them for 12 years and ate there twice a week the entire time. They are that good.
Delicious.
I do not enjoy Costco pizza and I enjoy more pizzas than I probably should.
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.
Rony's Fresh Pizza, Sep 15th 2022, 6:23:16 pm
Papa John's Pizza, Jun 14th 2021, 1:22:59 pm
Pizza Market, May 21st 2021, 6:00:57 pm
Do NYC "dollar" slices skimp on cheese in quantity and/or quality?
Most pizza even in NYC is not good, by my standards. I.e., I can do better than those at home.
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.
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.
I agree every region has its own good cheap food. Interesting stuff.
The $1 slice nearest chelsea flea market is the best I've had.
That could be overall inflation, which would cover rent, wages, utilities, taxes, etc.
The prices of tomatoes, flour, mozzarella, etc. would be even more relevant.
i'm still doing it someday though.