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Comment by rcme | Hacker News Reader

Many who grow up in the NY area grow up on pizza. In childhood, it's often eaten as a quick meal that doesn't require cooking. In adolescence, pizza is one of the only foods you can afford to eat out with your friends after school. In college, there's nothing like a drunken slice of pizza at 1 am. It's hard to overstate what a satisfying comfort food pizza is. There's truly nothing like it.

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I agree and would compare it to chips (French Fries) from a chipper in western europe. Grew up on the stuff and a bag of chips was affordable after school, was cheap when in college, and food from a chipper is a relatively cheap and delicious dinner option. I live in the US now and it's funny that I've not come across chips as a standalone meal, except in Irish/UK expat communities.

Or sausages in central Europe!

In Copenhagen (and maybe Berlin) it's döner kebab

Berlin has so many great cheap foods: döner, schwarma, falafel, and currywurst, to name a few.

I, personally, occasionally miss choking on the super stringy cheese of bowling alley pizza of elementary school era birthday parties. Do not miss drunken pizza of college as much.. Now it's just mostly costco frozen 5-pack

As a person who also grew up in NY, the slice was part of my childhood. I'd walk home from middle school and then high school and pass the local pizzeria where I could pick up a slice, Italian ice, and play coin operated video games. Galaga, Donkey Kong, and Pacman. I miss those carefree days where the world was simpler and the pizza tasted better.

I generally like pizza, but more interested in rich and sophisticated toppings, not just dough and cheese. Normally I have pizza about once in a month (except when I am vacationing in Italy, of course). If what you are saying is close to reality, I think I have an answer to US obesity problem.

That’s not just NY. I suspect it’s basically all of the US.

The Ninja Turtles got this picky-eater-as-a-child fella to give it a fair shake. Was my undisputed favorite type of food for like 15 years straight (when I started trying more things and discovered Middle Eastern and Indian food).

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.

Nowhere in the US is a slice as consistently affordable and ubiquitous as NYC.

It's different in NY due to the ubiquity, downward pressure on price, and all-hour coverage. You can be nearly anywhere, at any time, and be fed in minutes. You often eat while standing and remaining social. The experience anchors itself in your mind as an instant, omnipresent solution to hunger. There's also probably something to the infinitely nuanced territorial aspect of which slice is better (the answer is Prince Street).

Less mentioned about NYC is the 24-hour egg and sausage breakfast sandwich, fresh off a griddle. This, more than pizza, was my staple when I went to college in New York.

I see you did not go to college on a tight budget.

Eh, not so long ago you used to be able to get a decent bacon egg and cheese from a bodega for $3

What are chopped cheeses going for these days?

Still under $5 if you’re getting them on a Kaiser roll (as opposed to a sub)

Kaiser rolls are really the shit. It should be noted to the class warrior above... you used to be able to sit down in a lot of sit-down restaurants on the Lower East Side, and get a basket of free kaiser rolls and butter before you even ordered food. A foreign concept, I know! You could eat em and scram if you were of the mind to. That was when people had more class than to get a little nudge of self congratulations from judging each other's pocketbook based on which cheap fast food they ate, hoping for a popular online mob to agree with their stupidly ill informed opinion. But this will all fall on deaf ears, so, hallelujah there's still cheap breakfast sandwiches, and let the culture warriors who never experienced human civilization stick it up their ass.

Wtf are you talking about my guy. Subs are larger and carry more meat, so the sandwiches cost more. There’s no quality judgement in that statement (also weird to think of a sub roll as like some kind of luxury). It’s like saying a small coffee at Starbucks costs less than a large.

Starting to think maybe you’ve never been in a deli!

What? I had a place that was $3 with a soda!

Egg and bacon / egg and sausage were like $2 when I was there in the 90s. And they were about twice the diameter of the ones you get at McDonalds. I don't know what it costs now, maybe this is something like avocado toast that's become anomalously expensive, but calorie for calorie it was as cheap or cheaper than pizza back then. They could be bought from most bodegas that had a stove, as the peer points out. (The LA equivalent of this type of bodega was the "roach coach" - distinguished from modern food trucks by (a) an apparent lack of formal licensing, (b) presence of construction workers eating there, and (c) charging about 30% the price for the same items. The breakfast burrito, however, had not yet migrated to the East Coast).

$2 vs. a $1 slice...is twice the expense :)

> but calorie for calorie

At most non-fancy corner stores they're still under $4. Usually under $3 if you just want egg & cheese. And they're always made to order - ketchup, mayo, salt/pepper, hot sauce, on a roll or bagel, 50 cents extra for a tomato. I know New Yorkers can be a little insufferable about their bodegas, but I've lived in a few other major cities and none of them have provided me with this much access to a cheap breakfast.

It's true though, good breakfast burritos are still hard to come by here.

Thanks for the delicious reminder of how good those are! Nice to hear they're still competitive with pizza prices! I only eat once a day, since before college, so breakfast foods were like a sort of yearned-for delicacy in my world, especially at 3am in Brooklyn. That or cheap dumplings if I was anywhere near Chinatown. Hot corn muffin from the street vendor out my door if I was absolutely hung over and needed something in the morning...

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.

That sounds delicious.

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 :'(

Absolutely not. I've lived in a lot of places in the US, and almost none of them outside of a couple of major cities in New England had the equivalent of a NY slice. This has only changed somewhat recently (maybe past decade or so). Even still, it's not nearly as ubiquitous.

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.

New Haven CT has the best pizza in the US (and arguably the world)

Yeah, this guy needs to visit Wooster St stat.

Also, my fave place after living in New Haven for a year was technically in West Haven (Zuppardi's) but that's splitting hairs.

I’ve spent time in New Haven and NYC and… not even close. Sure there’s good slices in New Haven, but there are also pizza deserts, and a lot of them. New Haven does compete with NYC on restaurant-style pizza though.

Most of the good places in New Haven (Pepe's, Sally's, ...) didn't even do slices. New Haven style requires a fresh, whole pie.

Yeah this is how this conversation typically goes "but we've got good pizza from X, Y, Z restaurant" — is not the same as just walking to the corner and paying $2 for a big cheese slice — the NY slice is essentially a street food, like street tacos are in some states along the mexican border

> I've lived in a lot of places in the US, and almost none of them outside of a couple of major cities in New England had the equivalent of a NY slice.

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.

In the southwest it's tacos instead of pizza, in my experience.

In Californian cities, we mostly eat tacos instead of pizza.

You’d be surprised how hard it is to find pizza by the slice in many cities in the US

Sadly I feel this way about fast food chains and not pizza or tacos or anything cool (suburbs of California)

Don’t forget the the pre-drinks or dinner slice!

> Many who grow up in the NY area grow up on pizza.

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?

>How healthy is it to grow up on pizza?

See USA statistics for obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.

That you can blame on sugar in everything. Even what was blamed on saturated fat turns out to be caused by sugar and trans fat ("hydrogenated vegetable oil", now more-or-less banned, with certain disgraceful exceptions).

Pizza is relatively benign.

The dough is all carbs, which causes the same problem as sugar, and I am sure many places use sugar in their sauce. Unless you are doing a lot of cardio, a slice of cheese pizza is pretty void of nutrition.

The starch in dough is broken up into glucose, which is absolutely fine: nobody gets sick from eating starch. It would be better with some fiber, so your intestinal bacteria could have some of it.

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.

> slice of cheese pizza is pretty void of nutrition.

Unless you’re excluding the cheese, this is way off

Mozzarella is like 22% protein by weight.

Disagree.

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.

Grow up on can mean a lot of things here, I and many other New Yorkers would take it to mean the food that has the most significance in our memories. Its not about eating this stuff every day, it’s about the food we cherish.

100g of salted mozzarella has 300 calories, saturated fat, and sodium. Ultimately, pizza is basically 3 ingredients: bread, tomato sauce, and mozzarella. Most people don’t consider those individual ingredients particularly unhealthy.

>Most people don’t consider those individual ingredients particularly unhealthy.

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.

The GP specifically mentioned the calories and nutritional value of pizza. Personally, I think eating 100g of mozzarella for lunch is fine.

A good point but it's less about daily diet (sure, some people might), more about it being a go-to treat, for "cheat days" (days set aside to "cheat" during your diet), parties, sports games, work or school special occasions, etc.

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