I don't understand the enthusiasm for NYC pizza. It's like visiting chicago for the seafood. You can certainly get good seafood in Chicago, but why would you?
The majority of pizza in NYC is bad. Not just bad, terrible. Verging on inedible. (This is always true for any place calling itself "Rays" or "Original Rays" or "Ray Bari's" etc.)
But there is such a thing as NYC Style Pizza, and when it's done properly (which is rare), it's a thing of beauty and is really available in very few places other than NYC.
The next time you're in Manhattan, grab a slice or pie at Lombardis (http://newyork.citysearch.com/profile/7108110/) for a demonstration.
(Comparisons to Chicago are, in my opinion, a red herring: Chicago-Style Pizza and New York-Style Pizza are entirely different dishes that just happen to share a similar culinary heritage.)
Precisely. Good Chicago pizza (by which I mean, of course, stuffed pizza and not that "deep-dish" nonsense) is a marvelous and lovely food that is similar in name and ingredients to New York pizza, but bears no other meaningful comparison.
For good bagels, and good flat thin-crust pizza, you just have to go to New York. That's all.
(I met someone once who insisted that the best bagels in the world were to be found in Montreal. I'm still puzzling over whether he's more worthy of loathing or pity.)
Substitute, '...ordering seafood in Milwaukee,' if that makes the analogy simpler. I don't find NYC style pizza interesting, and although I'm sure it's done very well there, a well-done version of something I don't find interesting is not worth making an effort for, especially when there are so many other excellent foods which are not made as well elsewhere.
That's ridiculous. Of all the pizza on the North American continent, Wolfgang Puck probably has the closest thing to the original.
Which is not to say that I personally like it, but that's really beside the point. I can only conclude that you haven't had decent Chicago-style pizza (the Uno's chain SUCKS).
"New York pizza" is merely a label, though, for a style that one can find well-executed over much of the eastern US, including Chicago (http://fandango.evite.com/pages/venue/venueDetails.jsp?venueID=NTDEQNBMXYZXCVYQDTMB). Hell, you can get great pizza - by the slice - in Nashville, if you know where to go (http://fandango.evite.com/pages/venue/venueDetails.jsp?venueID=NTDEQNBMXYZXCVYQDTMB), and there are also other worthy regional pizza styles. Seattle has several pizzerias which serve pizzas so topping-laden that they're roughly the shape of the upper third of a basketball, probably the best-known of which is Northlake Tavern (http://northlaketavern.com/menu2.html). (The crust of Seattle pizza is a little on the stiff side, but it's still good.)
I can inconsolably pronounce with certainty, though, that you can't get decent pizza in Athens, Alabama. Boo hoo. (There are one or two places in Huntsville that don't totally suck, but 25 miles is a long way to drive for mediocre pizza.) And, given a decent recipe, you can bake a perfectly good Chicago pizza at home, whereas I can't fit a Blodgett oven in my kitchen.
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Canter's on Fairfax.
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The majority of pizza in NYC is bad. Not just bad, terrible. Verging on inedible. (This is always true for any place calling itself "Rays" or "Original Rays" or "Ray Bari's" etc.)
But there is such a thing as NYC Style Pizza, and when it's done properly (which is rare), it's a thing of beauty and is really available in very few places other than NYC.
The next time you're in Manhattan, grab a slice or pie at Lombardis (http://newyork.citysearch.com/profile/7108110/) for a demonstration.
(Comparisons to Chicago are, in my opinion, a red herring: Chicago-Style Pizza and New York-Style Pizza are entirely different dishes that just happen to share a similar culinary heritage.)
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For good bagels, and good flat thin-crust pizza, you just have to go to New York. That's all.
(I met someone once who insisted that the best bagels in the world were to be found in Montreal. I'm still puzzling over whether he's more worthy of loathing or pity.)
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Mom said that the best pizza she ever had was in Norway. There's no accounting for taste or bizarre statistical outliers.
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Substitute, '...ordering seafood in Milwaukee,' if that makes the analogy simpler. I don't find NYC style pizza interesting, and although I'm sure it's done very well there, a well-done version of something I don't find interesting is not worth making an effort for, especially when there are so many other excellent foods which are not made as well elsewhere.
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Which is not to say that I personally like it, but that's really beside the point. I can only conclude that you haven't had decent Chicago-style pizza (the Uno's chain SUCKS).
"New York pizza" is merely a label, though, for a style that one can find well-executed over much of the eastern US, including Chicago (http://fandango.evite.com/pages/venue/venueDetails.jsp?venueID=NTDEQNBMXYZXCVYQDTMB). Hell, you can get great pizza - by the slice - in Nashville, if you know where to go (http://fandango.evite.com/pages/venue/venueDetails.jsp?venueID=NTDEQNBMXYZXCVYQDTMB), and there are also other worthy regional pizza styles. Seattle has several pizzerias which serve pizzas so topping-laden that they're roughly the shape of the upper third of a basketball, probably the best-known of which is Northlake Tavern (http://northlaketavern.com/menu2.html). (The crust of Seattle pizza is a little on the stiff side, but it's still good.)
I can inconsolably pronounce with certainty, though, that you can't get decent pizza in Athens, Alabama. Boo hoo. (There are one or two places in Huntsville that don't totally suck, but 25 miles is a long way to drive for mediocre pizza.) And, given a decent recipe, you can bake a perfectly good Chicago pizza at home, whereas I can't fit a Blodgett oven in my kitchen.
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(Anonymous) 2006-08-20 07:46 pm (UTC)(link)For the same reason you can't get a real "Philly Cheesesteak" except in Philadelphia. You can copy the idea, but you cannot imitate the flavor.