There are three experiences I forgot to tell you about from my trip to the Pacific Northwest this year. The first experience happened on a morning in West Seattle (I’d written “East Seattle” and then Craig corrected me) with our friends David and Celia and their new baby, Johanna. Early in the morning, before my appointment with a chef at 9 AM, we all had breakfast at The Salvadorean Bakery.
Craig’s sister Kristin, a food-enthusiast, came to visit last week and sampled her way through some of New York’s most celebrated pizza (well, its most celebrated pizza within or around Bleecker Street.) And so she sampled Joe’s on 6th Ave. and Bleecker Street Pizza on 7th Ave. (her favorite) and, on Tuesday night, she joined Craig and me for pizza at John’s, our regular go-to good-old-fashioned coal-oven pizza joint.
I don’t have a fast answer to the question “what’s your favorite restaurant?” (it’s a tie, at this point, between Blue Hill Stone Barns & Prune) but I do have an immediate suggestion when someone is coming to New York for the first time and wants to know where to go: “Cafe Sabarasky,” I almost always say. “It’s one of my favorite places in the city.”
As a New York based food blogger, I often make an effort to vary my posts so that those of you not in New York–which, I imagine, is actually the large majority of you–can feel like I’m speaking to you too.
But this post, despite its New York specificity, has what I imagine is universal appeal–mostly because of a chef that I’ve loved and admired for as long as I’ve been interested in cooking. That chef is Mario Batali.
Pizza god Adam Kuban of SliceNY and Serious Eats had this to say the last time I made pizza: “AmGour: I love ya and all, man, but you gotta spread that dough out thinner!”
A thin crust, it turns out, is the sine qua non of perfect pizza. The great pizzas of New York–Di Fara, Franny’s, and Una Pizza Napoletana–all have relatively thin crusts that don’t overwhelm the other pizza elements. But, I must confess, when I’m at home making pizza my goal isn’t to recreate these laudable thin-crust pizzas; my goal is to recreate my friend Katy’s pizza, from the days when she lived close by in Atlanta.
Beware: when driving back from Cape Cod to New York, be wary of any Canadians or Yalies in your car. In our case, we had Dara (a Canadian) and Amir (a Yalie) both of whom were responsible for thousands of calories consumed against my innocent, food-shirking will. Why must food obsessives force me, a health-nut, to eat doughnuts and pizza when all I want are bags of trail mix and no-fat fruit smoothies? Are you buying any of this? No?
Ok, you’re right, the Canadian and the Yalie were certainly enablers, but I was the catalyst for all the fat we consumed on the drive back. The Canadian started it. Dara spied a sign for Tim Horton’s, which you see in the picture above. I’d recalled a Canadian reader e-mailing me once about Tim Horton’s, saying it’s the Canadian version of Dunkin’ Donuts only much, much better. Dara agreed. “We should go there,” either she said or I said; or maybe we both said it. We’d pulled off the highway anyway because we needed gas and there was Tim Horton’s, where, after the gas, we stopped for a bathroom and a doughnut.
Anyone who grew up in the 80s watching “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” will recall a very specific phrase that kicks in whenever the characters decide to order a pizza. I feel like you hear this phrase in “E.T.” when Eliot’s brother has friends over for poker and maybe in an episode of “Facts of Life” where Blaire learns the perils of superficiality. Either way, the phrase is emblematic of its time, not something you often hear today. The phrase is: “Hold the anchovies.”
Sometimes the name of a dish sounds so intimidating your immediate reaction is: “Pish posh! I can’t make that! And why did I just say pish posh?”
Such might be the case with the pizza you see above. You hear “pizza” and that doesn’t sound so difficult, but you add “caramelized onions, rosemary and gorgonzola” and you feel like you’re on Planet Impossible. Well come back to Earth, Earthling, and let me assure you: that pizza you see above may SOUND difficult, but it’s really a cinch. Here, let me convince you.
