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new pizza joint opened in our neighborhood recently. It’s called Marcello’s and it advertises
New York Style Pizza. My pizza-eating partner, a local writer named Marion who
is frequently published in these pages, insisted that we call the place the
same day the brochure was hung on her door. We are both East Coast exiles and
the very words, New York Style, cause the two of us to breathe heavily.
The guy on the phone sounded legit, he said Marcello was born in Italy, made
pizza in New York for a while and now had his own place. We ordered one pie,
half anchovy, half sausage. “Crispy crust, extra crispy crust, don’t show up at
the door unless the crust is crispy,” I cajoled the guy on the phone.
“No problem,” he answered.
“How’s the crust going to stay crisp in a cardboard box?” Marion asked
dismissively.
“Don’t you remember the pizza we ate last winter in New York?” Marion’s memory
of this particular pizza was understandably fuzzy, so while we waited for
Marcello’s to deliver the goods, I recalled the scene for her.
It was last December, my first visit to New York in five years. Marion’s plan for our first night in
Manhattan was to proceed immediately to a bar called Marion’s on Lower
Broadway. No, she doesn’t own the place, but she likes their martinis and she
also loves to fill her purse with the eponymous matchbooks. We met her friend
Sandye there and had a few cocktails while Marion stole matches.
Back on the street, mission accomplished, Marion asked me what my agenda was
for the first night in New York. I said it was a toss-up between a good slice
of pizza and a beer at McSorley’s Old Ale House. Sandye volunteered that we
could do both. McSorley’s, the chapel of saltines and sawdust, is on Seventh at
the Bowery, just a few blocks from where we were. Stromboli’s, Sandye’s
favorite Manhattan pizzeria, is on St. Mark’s and First, quite a walk away.
“You go to McSorley’s and have a beer, I’ll go get a pizza at Stromboli’s and
bring it back,” Sandye offered kindly. The raw wind and cold drizzle had
dampened my enthusiasm for hiking, so this deal was too good to refuse.
Marion and I staked out a spot at the short end of the ancient bar and ordered
a couple of brown ales. I was worried that McSorley’s wouldn’t allow us to
bring a pizza in. Marion asked the bartender if it would be okay. “Just eat it
down here at the end of the bar,” the kindly fellow winked. As we polished off
our second beers, a group of patrons stomped in, shaking the rain off of
themselves like dogs after a swim. “Poor Sandye,” we said to each other peering
out into the storm. If Woody Allen could have captioned the scene to show our
real thoughts, � la Annie Hall, my text would have read, “My poor
pizza.”
Over by the pot-bellied stove, a couple of guys got up to leave, surrendering
what must surely be the best table in McSorley’s on a cold December night.
Marion made a beeline for the empty seats and soon we were warming our hands by
the crackling fire while considering our third beers and Sandye’s plight. Just
then, a sodden pizza box plopped onto the table in front of us.
“I’m sorry, I fell down and dropped the pizza in a puddle,” Sandye apologized.
After placing the soaking Sandye near the fire and expressing our concern for
her health and swearing our eternal gratitude, we promptly got around to
opening the lid and examining the pie. It looked picture perfect. The yeasty
outer crust was pocked with crunchy bubbles and it was still warm. After a
brief if-I-don’t eat-soon-I’m-going-to-die speech, Marion extracted a long
shimmering slice and bit in.
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union who marched over from the adjacent dining room. “What do you think you’re
doing?” he boomed. “You can’t bring food in here, this is a restaurant.” Marion
took another bite and explained with her mouth full, “The bartender said we
could.”
While she argued, I took the pizza back to the corner of the bar where we were
supposed to be hiding it from the waiters. Marion looked around for the
bartender to whom we’d spoken, but he had wisely chosen this moment to
disappear. The other bartender shrugged innocently.
“I don’t care what the bartender said, you’re outta here,” the irate service
facilitator said as he closed in on me and the pizza. As a born New Yorker,
Marion has always maintained her composure in these sorts of situations.
Continuing to eat her slice of pizza in the face of a withering tirade of
threats and insults she mumbled something like, “I’m putting my coat on,
already,” while she defiantly crammed the rest of the crunchy crust into her
mouth. That’s what I love about Marion. She always eats her crust.
Launched outside into the freezing rain and inebriated, we surveyed a block
without awnings, alcoves, or taxicabs. While Marion speculated on the pedigree
of the waiter’s mother, I opened the still marginally warm cardboard box and
selected a slice. And I swear to you, as I stood there in the downpour, chewing
this lukewarm pizza which had been dropped in a puddle 30 minutes ago, my ears
were filled with an audible crunching noise.
“Now that,” I reminded Marion, “was a crispy pizza in a cardboard box.” “Yeah, but that’s New York,”
she sighed. Our pizza from Marcello’s arrived and it looked pretty good, but it
was soggy in the middle. “Aw, let’s give them another chance,” Marion said. “I
bet the crust would be better if we ate it there.” So a week or so later, we
drove over to Marcello’s at lunch time. Unfortunately, Marcello’s is a
delivery-only joint; it doesn’t have any tables or chairs. It doesn’t even have
a stand-up counter. Hungry for a New York pizza, we decided to drive someplace
else.
I wanted to go to Roppolo’s.
“I hate Roppolo’s,” she said. “That crust is 3/4 of an inch thick.”
I have been taking this kind of abuse from Marion and other East Coat exiles
about Roppolo’s pizza for five years now because I did a New York pizza survey
for the Chronicle half a decade ago and declared Roppolo’s the best in
town. Roppolo’s has used a quote from me in their advertising ever since.
“At least Roppolo’s is crispy,” I said defensively. “Yeah, but whole wheat
crust?” Marion mocked. We ended up at Tony’s Vineyard on the Drag that
afternoon where we had a good pizza, half sausage, half anchovy. The sausage
was loaded with fennel and garlic which made up for the lack of garlic in the
sauce. The crust was rolling pinned thin, but nicely crisp.
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been the central dilemma of Austin pizza. You can get a thin, crispy crust, but
this is achieved by putting the dough through a machine called a pizza sheeter
or by flattening it with a rolling pin. The result is crispy, but dense,
lacking in any of the air pockets that yeast normally produces. The lust for a
yeasty pizza dough is how I ended up recommending Roppolo’s five years ago. It
may be too thick, it may be whole wheat, but at least their pizza has some
yeast bubbles in it. Or at least it used to.
I finally persuaded Marion to join me at Roppolo’s for a pizza one night.
After a few bites, she recanted her hatred. The crust had mysteriously gotten
thinner. I looked at the bottom of the pizza, and sure enough, there were the
tracks of a pizza sheeter across the dough. The owner explained that he had a
new cook who didn’t like the thickness of the pizza either. Using a hand-held
pizza roller, the new cook was flattening the dough in the center. The pizza
was crispier, but the yeast bubbles were gone.
Determined to find a truly great pizza, Marion and I decided to keep on
eating. Over the course of the next month, we visited several pizzerias we
thought might have a chance. We had a hot, runny pizza at Milto’s, a pretty
good pie at Frank & Angie’s, a cardboardy crust at Brick Oven on 35th, and
one of those cracker-crisp numbers out at good old Nick’s by the lake.
Then one day, browsing through a series of messages on a Usenet site called
Austin Culinary Delights, I came across an exchange labeled: Pizza. In one of
the postings a woman who was new to town complained that she couldn’t find any
good pizza here. She also wanted to know who in the hell was this Robb Walsh
who was always quoted in the Roppolo Pizza ads. None of the respondents knew
who Walsh was supposed to be, but they did recommend a New York style pizzeria
called Reale’s way out on Hwy183.
It was most of the way to Cedar Park, but we went there anyway. The shopping center location didn’t
inspire much trust, but the scene inside did. It looked like a little Italian
joint on Long Island. We ordered a 14-inch pizza and hoped for the best. When
it came to the table, I thought Marion was going to cry. Huge brown bubbles
decorated the outside of the crust. It was chewy on the edges, crispy in the
middle and the toppings were outstanding. It was a New York pie, pure and
simple.
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check on us. We asked him how he succeeded in making a New York pizza in Austin
while so many others have failed. So he gave us his rant on what’s-a-matta with
Austin pizza. In Reale’s opinion, the new state-of-the-art pizza ovens are the
main problem. These conveyer belt convection ovens are designed to cook a pizza
in six minutes, which is great if you have a delivery chain that promises to be
there within a half-hour. But when Bobby Reale tried to cook his yeasty New
York-style pizza dough in one of these ovens, “The pizza literally blew up,”
says Reale. The pizza dough that most restaurant suppliers sell nowadays is low
in yeast to accommodate these ovens. “I make my own dough every morning,” said
Reale. “And it’s so yeasty that I can’t leave it out on the counter for more
than a few minutes or it starts rising and bubbling.” It is those air bubbles
and that yeast that make the crust for which we have been searching in Austin
all these years.
But before I made any rash statements with which I would have to live for
another five years, I decided to drag all my Yankee friends out there to verify
my opinion. These exiles from New Jersey, Philadelphia, Long Island, and
Brooklyn each had their own gripes about Reale’s. One berated Reale’s antipasti
(the salami was mediocre). Another trashed the sausage and peppers (the
peppers were undercooked), and somebody else panned the eggplant parmesan (too
mushy). But they all agreed about the pizza. When they were through with their
nostalgic blubberings and childhood pizza stories every one of them swore that,
without a doubt, Reale’s is the best New York pizza they have ever eaten in
Austin.
Now if we could only get Reale’s to open a location downtown.
This article appears in February 28 • 1997 and February 28 • 1997 (Cover).