Famous Original A's

Al Santillo Jr., with his hundred-year-old wood dough trays at Santillo's Brick Oven Pizza in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

I’ve known about Santillo’s Brick Oven Pizza for a few years now but shamefully had not visited it until this week. It’s known (if it’s known at all among a wider audience) for the fact that Al Santillo Jr. arranges a portion of his menu by year.

That is, folks come in, tell Al, “Your dad used to make it like this,” and Al will try to re-create it, naming it for the year the customer says he or she remembered it from.

But all that’s on my review on Slice »

When I visited Al on Wednesday, the first thing he told me was that he was experimenting with water. His daughter had brought him a five-gallon jug of NYC tap water, and Al was making

Truth is, Nick’s Pizza was not my first choice for a review this week. I actually went to Verde Coal-Oven Pizza with the intention of giving it the spotlight. But when I got to Verde what I found was a very nice owner one and a half weeks in to a new venture, still working out the kinks, in a neighborhood that could use more places like this. The pizza showed promise but wasn’t quite there. It wouldn’t have been fair to formally review the place for Slice and fault it. It’s way too early.

So I ended up at Nick’s Pizza, a joint that’s been around since 1993 and has its shit down pat. (more…)

Every April Fools Day on Slice, with maybe only one year that I missed, I join the rest of the internet in trying to get one over on the audience. I have a sneaking suspicion that I may have repeated a previous year’s joke today when I claimed that the best pizza in NYC was at Uno Chicago Grill — but I’m not going to go look in the Slice archives to prove myself right.

My favorite Slice April Fools remains the one where I took a screenshot of the Pizza Hut homepage and then used that as the Slice homepage — with a special note that was something like:

If you’re looking for Slice, we at Pizza Hut bought it and it now forwards here …

After a few seconds it auto-forwarded to the actual Slice homepage, but it was fun to read the comments that day.