[Pigging by Wilfrid: April 28, 2008]
A day-trip to New Haven, motivated by the purest aesthetic concerns (see below), nevertheless implies lunch.
Which in turn, implies pizza.
Two confessions. First, I was a New Haven pizza virgin. I've visited before, but it must be twelve years ago, and I recall being taken to brunch in a swanky hotel somethere.
Second, I am not a pizzamaniac. Many of my friends are. They will travel three hours through a blizzard for an appropriately blistered crust. Okay, I admit, I've done that too: there was snow on the ground the first time I made the endless subway ride to Di Fara's.
Generally speaking, though, I consider pizza to be a last-resort snack food rather than a delicacy. The ability to tell the good from the bad counts for something, but since - unlike burgers - almost all the pizza commercially available in New York is terrible, it's a skill rarely deployed. Like being able to tell a hoopoe when you see one.
Neither time, nor, to be candid, appetite allowed a tour of the New Haven pizzerias. Frank Pepe's eighty-three year old oven on Wooster Street got the nod, as it's the closest to primordial in its category.
Showing up at about one o'clock on a Sunday, there was a clutch of people milling outside hoping for a seat in the small internal waiting room. Still, it was only about a fifteen to twenty minute wait all told before being shown past the long bar and the oven, around the corner, and into a long dining room lined with booths. There are twenty-five numbered tables here, seating four to six people each: I conclude that Pepe is selling a lot of dough.
Service moves fast - as is only fair to the people in line - but is accommodating to newcomers. I was even offered a menu. Essentially, you can get the pie in three sizes, with tomato or with tomato and mozzarella, and then add toppings from a fairly traditional list. There was some argument at my table about what traditional is, and I had to concede some broccoli in order to avoid more outlandish selections. Mozzarella and hunks of extra-fennelly sweet sausage made up the numbers. I do not like over-laden pies.
This huge pizza, which could have fed four reasonable people, was priced around twenty dollars.
The pie was so large, the crust could hardly help but wilt near the center. It was firmer at the perimeter, with excellent, crisp charring at the edge. Always a good sign when the outer rim, with no topping, is a delicious part of the pie. Very good sausage, crunchy broccoli, aromatic sauce. I can't argue. Beer or soda by the pitcher, and well worth the wait.
Pepe on the web right here.
