Famous Original A's

Links to my reviews and posts over on Slice. Sometimes these posts will give you a little “Behind the Slice” action — insights and information that would bore Slice‘s general audience. You know, the inside-baseball stuff, the navel-gazing.

This review was one of the funnest of I done in a while. I had plenty of time to do it, had great light, and great weather. The pizza itself was wonderful, which always makes for a more enjoyable post. It’s much easier to write about something when you’re enthusiastic about it. (more…)

On Slice this week I unleashed my SpaghettiOs Pizza with Meatballs upon the world. There’s not much to say about this besides the fact that it was a “stunt pizza.” At some point after Hurricane Irene we had a couple cans of SpaghettiOs left from our disaster rations. We ate through them pretty quickly (well, I think my wife did). But while they were around, I had the idea for SpaghettiOs pizza. I mean, look, the sauce is built in. And I’d been researching spaghetti-topped pizza at the time. Why not?

I do have to admit that I had to go out and buy a can of SpaghettiOs with Meatballs for this post. So it’s not purely an “eat down the pantry” effort. Not worth wasting a pizza doughball on.

Over on Slice I make Thanksgiving pizza stuffing. This side dish is made with sausage, so I’ll use that as an entrée into how the pro-blogging sausage is made.

When holidays roll around and current events get big enough, you’ll see blogs adjusting their coverage around these happenings. Obviously a food site is going to go full-bore Thanksgiving. I don’t think any other site does Thanksgiving as well as Serious Eats. But some of that mania means that Thanksgiving creeps into some weird places — like the world of pizza. (more…)

“Why is it so smoky in there? When I have visited Di Fara, there are times that my eyes have burned so much that I was crying… from pain and unhappiness, not from deliciousness. Eating at Di Fara is like eating in a coal mine.” —my wife, in a memorable rant about why she hates Di Fara, over on Slice »

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.

I had a lot of fun with the Koronet review on Slice. Go read it here »

I think I’d always described the jumbo slice there as being “bigger than your head.” But I’d never tested that statement. Yup. It’s pretty much true. I knew I had to take a photo to document this.

I’d only been to Koronet a handful of times before I visited for my review. I always sort of remembered it as being not horrible but not good. Turns out that it’s actually pretty good. I wouldn’t say it’s the best slice out there, but I think Colin the Slice Harvester is dead on when he says the story doesn’t begin and end just with the gigantic size. It’s actually got some good-quality stuff going on — just on an epic scale.

Turns out, too, the Manikis family, who own Koronet, are basically my neighbors. They live about a block down from me in Astoria. Small world.

Koronet Pizza

2848 Broadway
New York NY 10025 (at 110th Street; map)
212-222-1566