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 - 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.