Mythic pizza
by David Benjamin
“You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”
— Yogi Berra
MADISON,
Wis.— So, there I was — about a month ago — standing on the sidewalk on
a clammy night in Taipei, hip-deep amongst the hip, the young and the
trendy, watching for our number to appear on the display in the window
at Din Tai Fung, reputedly the best damn dim sum joint in either of the
two Chinas. Hotlips, my brilliant spouse, along with our hosts, Judith,
Grace and Brandon, were eager for the experience and patient with the
obligatory delay.
I was a little less starry-eyed because I tend to regard dim sum as glorified hors d’oeuvres.
However, I’ll eat just about anything Chinese (except duck tongues), so
I did my best to blend with the hundreds huddling ‘round the
restaurant’s plastic mascot, a giant hydrocephalic dumpling-boy.
Inevitably, my mind wandered to similar scenes in New York, where the
local pizza cult strikes an eerie parallel to this dim sum dementia. New
York City’s pizza exceptionalism requires communicants to not only
queue up outdoors in the rain, snow, heat and dark of night, but to stay
outside, on their feet. They eat — lest they be ostracized and mocked
by friends and family — with their hands (Din Tai Fung supplies
chopsticks) and follow an exacting ritual prescribed and enforced by a
legion of self-appointed pizza nazis who prowl the streets in search of
heretics.
The first precept of New York pizza orthodoxy is that
New York not only has the best pizza on earth, but that there would be
no pizza at all without New York. The accepted gospel is that pizza was
born at a tiny storefront bistro in the East Village in the year 1561,
almost 60 years before the Mayflower docked at Battery Park, just east
of Whitehall Street. The Italians later claimed to have thought of it
first, but only because Amerigo Vespucci got the original pizza chef
drunk on dago red and stole the recipe.
Second, because New York
is the center of the pizza universe, the city’s most-discussed topic
(hashed out passionately on the food pages of the Times, the Daily News, the Post, the Voice, Newsday, New York, The New Yorker and the Bergen Record,
is which pizzeria makes the BPNY (Best Pie in New York). This means, of
course, that there isn’t just one BPNY. The number can slip two to
three. It can balloon, in any given news cycle, to as many as fifteen,
with locales ranging from Arthur Avenue to Mulberry Street to Hell’s
Kitchen and Park Slope, with names that tend to sound more authentic if
they carry an apostrophe — Al’s, Luigi’s, Tony’s, Porfirio’s, Dona
Lucia’s Pizza and Sushi. Like that.
BPNYs pop up randomly and
ascend precipitously to citywide fame, only to fall out of popular favor
in a New York minute. The title migrates from borough to borough on the
breakneck bandwagon of fickle fancy. If there’s any consolation in all
this churn, it’s that your average New Yorker can wake up to discover
that he or she is suddenly only two or three stops away — on the best
subway system since the official opening of the Handbasket to Hell —
from the best pizza (at least according to Yelp) in the history of
Western civilization (at least for a month or so).
Okay, next we have the rules. Listen up.
Anywhere
else in a world of less-famous pizza, you go inside, grab a table,
order your pie in a size that matches your appetite (small, medium,
large) and blithely consume it any way you want, with or without
implements.
Not in New York, where a block-long queue (which New
Yorkers call “standing on line” and everyone else calls “standing in
line”), largely composed of review-reading 20-something hipsters, is the
telltale hallmark of culinary conquest.
When you finally get to
the counter, your choice of sizes comes down to one: Huge. You don’t
order by diameter, you order by the “slice.” To the outside world, this
seems a queer, nebulous measure. In New York, “slice” and “pizza” are
synonyms so freighted with meaning that the hardcore New Yorker seeking
his pie anywhere west of Delaware Gap has difficulty being understood.
“Whaddya mean, how many slices? Who the hell counts?”
The
immense wedge that eventually shows up, ideally lapping over the
perimeter of of a paper plate that has the tensile strength of a
handwritten sonnet by Mrs. Browning, is gooily overflowing its crust and
feloniously hot. A prudent diner would set it aside briefly, ’til the
sauce ceases to bubble and the cheese de-liquifies.
Not in New York. That would be chicken.
Your
redblooded New Yorker addresses this seething slab by folding it upon
itself, then elevating it ’til the pointy end aims down, toward his or
her mouth. The slice thus becomes a slippery slope. As the slice enters
the consumer, a molten river of tomato-flavored lava and boiling
mozzarella separates itself and plummets toward the tender tissues of
the inner cheeks, the vulnerable tongue and the delicate surface of the
ill-named hard palate. The subsequent second-degree burns and loss of
all sensation — except pain — are every New York pizza-lover’s red badge
of blistered inflammation.
Ideally, the altar where this
ceremony climaxes is a Formica counter or a tiny round stand-up table —
ideally on the sidewalk — shared elbow-to-elbow with a host of
strangers whose urban solidarity is implicit in their rudeness. Just as
only an apostate or blasphemer would touch a pizza with knife or fork,
only a sissy would eat it sitting down.
There is, fortunately, an
antidote to this hidebound adherence to form, conformity and fleshly
mortification. It’s called takeout. Once you grab the box, overtip the
kid and shut the door, you’re free — even in Soho, Chelsea or TriBeCa,
even in the darkest ethnic dens of Corona and Rockaway. In sinful
privacy, without fear of public censure or big-city ridicule, you can
pull up a chair, open a napkin, pick up a fork. You can even say Grace.
If only the pizza were better.
Thursday, May 25, 2017
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