[Pigging by Wilfrid: May 5, 2014]
Thanks to the worldwide fame of Roberta's, and gushing articles about local fashion and culture, it's long been assumed that Bushwick is a great place to eat.
Given how hard it is to get into Roberta's (how's pizza delivery these days?), Bushwick is no more than a decent place to eat; and it has achieved that status only recently. Archie's is a casual addition.
Disclosure: I do know some of the people involved in Archies, but it has probably never crossed their minds that I write about food, and any beverage buybacks were in the normal course of beverage buybacks.
I can recite the local possibilities by heart. Fritzl's Lunchbox (small, and with a short menu, but good). Dear Bushwick (small, and with a longer menu, but they've usually run out of stuff). Miles (I haven't yet tried The Wheelhouse) for grilled cheeses, BurgerItUp for burgers. There's a dining room in the back The Falls Lounge. 983 is a better version of Life Cafe. What else?
Well, until recently, there wasn't a slice of pizza you'd want to eat (sorry, Norbert's). Along came Archie's.
The location used to be a restaurant with a curiously international menu, Bushwick Kitchen. It's transformed, not least after dark by a huge neon Archie's sign which stands out like a beacon to lure late night munchers. It has a full license, and very much a bar feel, although there are tables against the tiled walls. The menu is rigorous: pies (slcies if you must), grinders, a salad. A couple of toppings--meatballs, sausage--can be ordered as small plates. Shout at the bar and grab a number.
I mixed a pie up, half vegetables, half pepperoni. The style? Greek-Connecticut? It's not Neapolitan, anyway. No blistering, no gathering moistness at the center of the pie. Dimitri Karapanos makes it the way his father has been making it for forty years at Wilson Pizza Palace, in Windsor, Ct.
The advantage of his approach? A crisp, sustaining crust. I can't eat slices which hang from my hand like a wet handkerchief. The crust has a notably deep rim, which takes it a step in the direction of a deep-dish pizza, but doesn't prompt unwieldy over-loading of toppings.
And the toppings are enjoyably bright and fresh; vegetables which have seen sunlight, and plenty of them. Pies come in ten and fourteen inch sizes, a dollar an inch. A quarter of a big pie is the $3.50 slice.
If you want unwieldy, look to the grinders. Yep, Connecticut's take on the hero, hoagie, or submarine. Served on stubby lengths of crusty bread, the grinders--rationally enough--share most of the same toppings as the pizzas, although there are steak, capicola, and cheese burger options too.
Eating these beasts is a messy, multiple-napkin business. On my Italian sausage grinder (thick, meaty slices of sausage), the cheese was thoroughly melted, and overflowed the bread, along with generous hunks of sweetly roast peppers. These are all nine bucks.
Part of the full bar is the all-Greek wine list. My eye was somehow drawn to $9 half-liter bottles of Retsina. Retsina, if you've not tried it, is a resinated wine, matured with Aleppo pine resin. It's an aquired taste--think pine forests, wood chips, floor polish. I like it, but then I'm familiar with it from the London Greek restaurants of my youth. How about that label?
And believe me, at $18 a liter, it's going to take you a long way. How you get back, I don't know.
Archie's is open evenings and until 4am, and it has a Facebook page.
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