New Haven Pizza Wars - some final thoughts

Seven weeks ago, I came to New Haven, CT for a short-term job. I quickly assimilated into my new collegiate culture (hooded sweatshirts! bad poetry! cheap beer!) but when I was unable to find any notable sweet pies to blog about, I turned to a different kind of pie - the pizza pie.

Pepe's apizza

Known for a very specific kind of Neapolitan pizza called the apizza, New Haven is home to a thinly crusted, cheese-less, fresh tomatoed, oven-baked delicacy. Chicago-style deep dish this is not. At it's thickest, an apizza measures less than an inch. Burned splotches on the crust are common. Cheese is considered a topping.

Sally's apizza

Before arriving in New Haven, I had never had an apizza. After doing some research for this project and reading the many testimonials of happy and satiated patrons on both Yelp and the restaurants' personal websites, I got really excited. Here I was, a frequent consumer of pizza for almost 30 years about to try a NEW type of pizza! The last time I was this animated over pizza was when they put the cheese in the crust sometime in the early 90's.

But here's the thing: after spending seven weeks eating apizzas, I realized that I'm just not a fan. Maybe it's my upbringing. Maybe I'm too much of a Midwestern at heart. Maybe I'm just too used to the greasy, cheesy mess the rest of the country calls a pizza. But while some of the apizzas I ordered were certainly tasty (and absolutely none were so bad there were rendered inedible), I was ultimately underwhelmed by the cuisine.

Modern apizza

In fact, the grocery-store-brand frozen pizza I'm munching on right now is tastier, was cheaper to buy, easier to obtain, and has more fresh toppings than any pizza I'd order in a restaurant because I added my own spinach, mushrooms and tomatos before I put it in the oven.

Nevertheless, I did spend a good part of the month of April eating, critiquing, and ranking four different apizzas - Abate's, Pepe's, Sally's, and Modern - all located in New Haven, and all basically claiming to have the city's best pie.

Here's what I learned:

*Cheapest - Sally's
     ...by about $1. After the total cost of a small, cheese and mushroom pizza with tax and tip, I spent between $12 and $12.50 at each of the restaurants.

*Longest wait - Sally's
     Granted, this is a little skewed. I patronized the other three restaurants early on weekdays in order to reduce wait-time, but Sally's is only open in the evenings. But even after arriving 45 minutes before the doors opened, I still had to wait a while for a table, and even then it took almost 40 minutes for my food to arrive once I finally ordered.

Waiting for a table at Sally's

*Best service - Modern
     The waitstaff was positively chipper during the entire duration of my meal, water arrived at the table within seconds of my request, my server checked on me once the pizza was delivered, and I never once got an annoyed look for being a solo diner.

*Worst service - Pepe's
     The waiter did pleasantly inquire about the book I was reading during my lunch (Erik Larson's In The Garden of Beasts, if you're curious), but the pizza was served most unceremoniously, my water was never refilled, no one asked if everything was ok, and it took forever to get the check and the bill.

*Best ambiance - Sally's
     The old pleather booths, wood-panelled walls, neon signs - walking into Sally's was like stepping onto the set of Empire Falls. Add to that the fact that Sally herself was there, greeting old friends and working the register, and you've got yourself a pretty great pizzeria.

*Best cheese - Modern
     I could actually taste the cheese on this apizza. As in, there was a thick enough layer of cheese for my taste buds to recognize that it was actually cheese

*Best sauce - Abate's
     Tangy. Sweet. Just how I like it.

*Best crust - Sally's
     A bit burnt, but overall thin and crispy and nice.

*Worst mushrooms - Modern
    They were canned. Really?

*Worst apizza - Pepe's
     I hate to crown a "worst-of" but I really did not like Pepe's pizza. The cheese was bland, the crust was burnt, and I don't even want to talk about the sauce. It was the only time during this project when I left a restaurant still hungry.

*Best apizza - Abate's
     The crust was not charred, the mushrooms were fresh, and the sauce was great.

Abate's apizza

Ultimately, I realize that the apizza is to New Haven what the cheesesteak is to Philly, chili is to Cincinnati, and the Long Island Iced Tea is to, well, Long Island - a loved treat that gives the city a little fame, a little lore, and a lot to live for.

And that's exactly the point of a famous dish. It's not that it's so culinarily perfect that it can't be replicated elsewhere or by others, but it utilizes local ingredients and traditions that showcase the best of a city and allows its citizens to have a little hometown pride for one of their own.

However - I'm headed home to Chicago this weekend to stand up in a friend's wedding, and after the BBQ being served at the reception (you heard me) and the hot dog I'm going to sober up with neatly consume while at the Cubs game (there's always next year...), the food I am most looking forward to eating is the pizza my family orders from Riggio's, right around the corner from our house.

New Haven Pizza Wars - Modern

My fourth and final battle of the New Haven Pizza Wars took place the other day at Modern Apizza, which I choose for a few reasons: it has some pretty stellar Yelp reviews, a handful of people I've met in New Haven mentioned it in their list of apizzarias to hit up ("oh, you gotta go to Sally's, definitely Moderne, Pepe's too..."), and it's not nestled within the much-hyped Wooster Square area that's home to my now-familiar apizza haunts. It was time to branch out from the usual.

By this point I knew the drill - arrive early on a weekday, marvel at the amount of people who already have giant pizzas on their tables, grab the first booth I can find, order myself a small mozzarella-and-mushroom-pie.

I first noticed how extremely nice and speedy the waitstaff was. While the folks at the other three restaurants weren't not nice, they were pretty blasé about the whole serving thing, and I definitely waited quite a while for things like water, food, and my check. At Modern, I was greeted immediately upon sitting down, given water mere seconds after that, and though the restaurant was almost completely full by the time I place my order (New Havenites really like their apizza), my lunch arrived just 9 minutes later.

It wasn't the most photogenic of apizzas. And at first sight, I wasn't too impressed - the cheese was an odd, pale color, I was uninspired by the mushrooms, and as I had since come to expect, burnt sections dotted the edges.

It was, however, pretty tasty. Ample amounts of cheese covered the crust - so much more than I'm now used to that I realized just how much cheese actually goes on a pizza (versus an apizza). Under my old Chicago-style circumstances, I would never had thought this was a lot of cheese.  The sauce was sweet, the crust had a nice crunch to it, and I was delighted to discover what I thought were completely burnt parts were instead just tastefully blackened. The mushrooms, though, were definitely out of a can.

With tax and tip, it cost $12.50, and I was happy to eat the leftovers for lunch breakfast the next day.

Stay tuned for next week, when I wrap up the war correspondence and determine, once and for all, who makes the best apizza in New Haven.

Want to read the previous Pizza War entries? Here's where I talk about Abate's, Pepe's, and Sally's! 

New Haven Pizza Wars - Sally's

The following is an almost accurate transcription of the notes I took during the third and most fateful battle of the New Haven Pizza Wars.

Date: Sunday, April 15, 2012

Location: Sally's Apizza, New Haven, CT.

4:01pm - I begin the walk from my apartment to Sally's. My sources tell me this is the hardest of all apizzas to obtain, for the restaurant is only open six days a week, five hours a day (Tues-Sun, 5-10pm). This is parallel to almost all my work hours here in New Haven, so I have one chance, and one chance only to catch the elusive pie.

4:15pm - I arrive at Sally's. It's dark inside. No activity is spotted in the immediate area. In contrast, the line outside of Pepe's is nearing 20-deep. I question the "get here early" advice found on both Yelp and Sally's website, shrug, and walk around the neighborhood.

4:19pm - I find a nearby park playing host to the Wooster Square Cherry Blossom Festival. My allergies flare up. I stop to pet some dachshunds. This brightens my day.

4:27pm - I remember why I'm in the area in the first place and head back to Sally's.

4:33pm - In the 18 minutes I spent listening to someone from the New Haven Historical Society tell me about their cherry blossoms, people started lining up for pizza. I am now the 8th person in line.

4:37pm - 5 more people get in line

4:41pm - It starts drizzling. Not a heavy rain, but enough for me to notice that Sally's does not have an awning.

4:49pm - I put away the book I've been reading to occupy my wait in line because it's drizzling harder and I realize it's too hard to hold an umbrella and a hardcover book at the same time.

4:53pm - 18 people in line, and not a lot of them have umbrellas.

4:55pm - On his walk past Sally's, a gentleman from the neighborhood stops near the front of the line and loudly proclaims, "I can name three things better than Sally's: my mom, my wife, and my daughter!" He continues walking.

4:57pm - The group in front of me are passing the time by fondly recalling past Sally's visits ("Oh, I got mozzarella on mine once...oo yeah, you gotta get the mooz...and the clam pie, I had that once...oh yeah, you gotta get the clams...")

4:59pm - The group behind me notices that there's one minute left. "I am starving!" the lady calls out.

5:01pm - My stomach starts growling.

5:03pm - A cop and his brunette lady-friend walk past the line, into the restaurant, and get seated. 25 people in line now have mixed expressions of annoyance, respect, jealousy and awe.

5:07pm - There are now two lines - those of us waiting for a table, and a gaggle of locals watching those of us in line. The air is a mixture of excitement, hunger and humidity, and I feel like that time I spent 105 minutes waiting in line for a turn on Superman - The Ride at Great America and right before I got buckled in, I had this immense fear that it wasn't going to as good as those 2 hours of waiting had built it up to be.

5:08pm - Fluorescent lights go on, the door opens and...the groups of people who have been watching us are let in. Apparently they made reservations. "So much for being the first in line," says the guy at the (former) front of the line.

5:10pm - I enter the hallowed doorway. There is a brief reshuffling of seats when I tell the waiter "Just one...nope, only me, I'm by myself" and he moves two people from a really small table to a booth so I can be seated at the really small table.

5:13pm - Sally starts working the room, greeting guests and hugging old friends. She's wearing a flowery blouse I'm pretty sure my grandmother once owned, an orange and yellow apron with 50-year old grease stains, and bifocals with the longest and most garishly beaded chain I've ever seen. She's adorable. I'm enchanted.

5:16pm - The waiter takes my order.

5:19pm - I notice the enthusiastic gentleman from outside laughing with Sally and others near the kitchen. It turns out he's an old friend of the establishment, not a crazy person as I had originally thought.

5:28pm - I get antsy and start taking still life's.

5:44pm - My apizza arrives.

5:47pm - It's not bad...it's ok, but it doesn't really taste like...anything? That can't be right.

5:49pm - I eat. I think. What makes this so different from not just all the (regular) pizza slices I've eaten, but the other two apizzas I've had?

5:51pm - Enlightenment. I get it. I get the point of an apizza - it's the perfect blend of the crust, sauce, and toppings - so that no one component outshines the others. Most other pizza's have a theme - Meat Lover's Pizza. Four-cheese. Hot-dog-in-crust. But a Sally's apizza isn't that at all. It doesn't have to showcase one ingredient over another, because it's created so everything fuses together. You don't really taste the sauce, the crust isn't that noticeable, the cheese doesn't come out and scream, "hey! I'm cheese!!" Instead, what you taste is the harmonic combination of it all - and it tastes good.

5:56pm - I get the check. My small mozzarella and mushroom cost around $8, but I ordered a ginger ale as well. With tax and tip, $12 total.

6pm - I'm out the door, giving my table to the next lucky customer.

New Haven Pizza Wars - Pepe's

Reasons I think I'm qualified to eat and critique pizza pies:

* I was born and raised in Chicago, home of the gooey, cheesey delicious monstrosity known as the Deep Dish Pizza
* I have spent the better part of the last decade as a waitress in various sports bars and mid-scale (but with cloth napkins!) restaurants, so I know my way around a table setting
* One of those waitressing jobs was in my uncle's (now cousin's) pizza joint The Pizza Factory of Barrington. It was an immersion into the wild and wonderful world of pizza making, and I actually got good enough to just "know" when the slice was heated to perfection and ready to come out of the oven.
* I'm an American, dammit, and I have opinions, and if I self-publish any of them, they become official.

That being said, I ventured out of my apartment the other day to find and eat the second of my New Haven Pizza War's pie - Pepe's Pizza, home of the original New Haven apizza. Founded in 1925 by Frank Pepe, this apizza set the standard by which all other apizzas were to be baked. As is customary, ordering a "plain" will get you fresh tomato sauce, some grated cheese, olive oil, garlic, oregano, and not much else. Mozzarella is considered a topping.

I arrived at Pepe's around 11:45am on a Wednesday morning. Yes, that's early for pizza. That's actually too early for anything besides a bagel or maybe a breakfast sandwich, but here's the thing - Pepe's opens at 11:30am each day, but when I arrived just 15 minutes after the doors opened, the place was already half full. I had heard that waiting up to an hour for a table is common, regardless of the time or day of the week. I'm a busy person and had no desire to wait that long for a slice of pizza, so I arrived much earlier than I normally would have for a mid-week lunch.

Most of the patrons were elderly couples with only a few young families and solo business lunchers dotting the diner-like booths, which allows me to believe that this isn't just a tourist trap - people have been coming here for apizza for years. Maybe this wouldn't be quite the case on a Friday night in the summer, but I actually have no intention of seeing what that's like.

I luckily found a table right away and it wasn't too long before the waiter approached. I inquired of the difference between a tomato pizza with cheese and a margherita pizza, and was told that the margherita is made with fresh mozzarella, while everyday (processed) cheese is used on all the rest. Great! I ordered a margherita with mushrooms...and was told I couldn't alter the margherita pizza. Ok, fine, so instead I ordered the tomato pizza with mozzarella and mushrooms (I like mushrooms, and decided right then and there that if I was doing a true cross-pizza comparison, I should keep my toppings consistant).

Not gonna lie - I had high expectations for Pepe's. It's "the" pizza place in New Haven, a bunch of people told me I absolutely had to go there, and after finding a really good pizza at last week's restaurant, I was expecting nothing short of cullinary gold. And when I finally bit into the slice...it wasn't good.

I don't want to bash the place too much. It is, after all, one of New Haven's most-loved restaurants. And it's very possible I caught them on an off day. Or maybe they bring in their B-Team on Wednesday mornings. But in no particular order, here is how an 87-year-old pizzeria screwed up my lunch:

   - The sauce - bland. I'm pretty sure it had no spices whatsoever, and I like a sweeter sauce with a bit of a bite.

   - The cheese - meh. And VERY oily. There were pools of grease atop the pizza, so many that I had to blot each slice like I did back in high school when it was pizza day and I was concerned about fitting into my Winter Dance dress.

   - The crust - awful. It was doughy cardboard for the first half of the slice, but then switched to crisp cardboard for the latter half.
   - Large swaths of the cheese and crust were burnt. I'm all for a coal-oven cooking method, but I think someone in the kitchen forgot to take my pizza out on time.
   - Mushrooms - there could have been more. And I guess they were fresh, but I was too busy gnawing at the crust to really notice.

And I was one of the first customers of the day! Maybe the ovens were still working their way to regulation temperatures, maybe the chefs were still warming and/or waking up, but still. I ate three pieces because I was hungry, but didn't enjoy any of them. I took the rest to go in hopes that it would make for some good cold pizza - on the contrary, I think it got worse in the fridge.

Ho hum. You win some, you lose some. I suppose that at $12 (pizza, tax, and tip) it wasn't a huge monetary loss. And I did eat the rest of the leftovers over the next few days (it was bad, not inedible. And I don't believe in wasting food). But here's hoping my the next New Haven apizza I order doesn't leave me seriously considering a permanent relocation back to Chicago.

New Haven Pizza Wars - Abate's

I am spending the month of April living in the delightfully collegiate town of New Haven, CT, which means a few things:
   1.) I am soaking up so many Yale brain waves that my intellect has increased tenfold. I am sure to go back to my standard level of thought-processing the second I cross back into New York.
   2.) Due to archaic liquor sale laws, the state of Connecticut does not sell alcohol on Sundays. Therefore, I have to remember to purchase on Saturday all the alcohol I think I'll want to drink on Sunday. This is harder than it seems.
   3.) I will be writing about the phenomenon know as the New Haven Pizza Wars, because this is a blog about pie, and after a good mixed berry, there's nothing quite like a slice of pizza pie. That, and New Haven is decidedly not known for their dessert pies.

According to this Wikipedia article, the Neapolitan-style pizza found in New Haven is known locally as apizza. It is characterized by a thin, crispy crust that is topped with tomato sauce, oregano, and a sprinkle of romano cheese, and baked in a brick or high-temperature oven. Mozzarella is considered to be a topping (if you order a "plain" pizza, don't expect it to come covered in cheese). The apizza dates back to the early 1920's, when a man named Frank Pepe started serving "tomato pies" at his shop on Wooster Street. Many others followed suit, and to this day the area serves as New Haven's "Little Italy" and is dotted with gelaterias, delis, and pizzerias.

This afternoon, I found myself on Wooster St. after a failed attempt to walk to Ikea (after living in New York City, I'm alway shocked to discover just how much of the rest of the country is NOT pedestrian-friendly). Disappointed in my lack of Sweedish meatballs, I decided to find out what this apizza buzz was really about and stopped in the first place I saw.

Abate's seems at first to be the annoying younger brother of the apizza dynasty. Whereas the other big-time players all opened their doors in the 1920's-1930's, Abate's wasn't born until 1992 but nevertheless totes itself as one of the main contenders. Having eaten my first bite of apizza only a few hours ago, I cannot compare Abate's with the others (spoiler alert...it's entirely probable that I'll try as many New Haven pizzas as possible and then declare a winner at the end of my time here...), but I CAN say that I was incredibly surprised and impressed with what I ordered.

Mozzarella and mushroom apizza from Abate's

First of all, this was the closest I've come in all of New England to eating a pizza that tastes like my beloved Chicago-style-thin-crust. Only the very center of the pie had a limp crust (as opposed to New York-style slices that you can literally fold in half), the rest was crispy and crunchy, and actually had traces of the cornmeal that's spread on the counter before rolling the dough. The sauce was sweet and tangy. The mushrooms were fresh. The cheese, though minimal, was tasty.

What impressed me most, though, was the crust. Anyone can spread sauce and cheese on some baked bread and call it a pizza. Not everyone can make a homemade crust in which you can actually see the striations of dough and taste traces of the cornmeal that's spread on the counter before it's rolled. I am a fan of such crusts.

This pizza also was pretty moderately priced - with tax and tip, the 12" mozzarella + one topping pizza cost $12 - and I brought half of it home for dinner. I'm pretty excited to try all the other apizza places that New Haven has to offer; if they taste anything like Abate's, I will certainly not go hungry in this city.