Villa Milano Famous NY Pizza, East Hartford CT

Not too long ago, Maryanne read about a new pizzeria opening in East Hartford, called Villa Milano Famous NY Pizza. According to the article in the Hartford Courant, owners Eddie and John Kilenovic owned pizzerias in NYC and recently decided to move their businesses to Connecticut.  Over the past couple of days, we stopped in a few times to try out the various pizzas and other items.

Villa Milano is located at 456 Main Street in East Hartford. It's on the north-bound side of the street right across from the Coca-Cola Bottling Company's deco brick building.  Keep a sharp eye out as you approach, because the unassuming brick building can be kind of easy to miss.

The pizzeria offers both take-out and dine-in service. As you walk in the front door, there are a series of booths on the right, and a glass display case and service counter in front of the kitchen on the left. The display case usually shows off several of the delicious foods on offer - there are garlic knots and pizzas ready to sell by the slice.

Lynnafred loves Sicilian pizza, so on our first visit there we ordered a Sicilian Grandpa pie: thick, square crust topped with sauce, fresh mozzarella, and fresh basil. It took about 20 minutes to come out of the kitchen (not a bad wait - pretty typical for a place that makes their pies fresh, actually.) We had ordered it to go, but the owner insisted on calling us over and presenting to us before boxing it up.  One look at it, and I could see why:

Look at that. That's not just a pizza, it's a work of art.  And it was also one of the best Sicilian pies we have ever had. The dough was just slightly crispy at the edges and on the bottom, but light and pillowy beneath the excellent sauce. Shredded mozzarella was sprinkled atop the sauce, and then the pieces of fresh mozzarella were added in decorative designs of stars, flowers, and stripes. Fresh basil leaves were sprinkled over the pie after it came from the oven, allowing the residual heat to wilt them into sauce and cheese. It was an awesome Sicilian pie, one like I haven't had in over twenty years, and this pizza resolved us to return to try out some of the other offerings.

On a later visit, Maryanne and I decided to sample slices of their standard thin-crust New York-style pizza, and the Roman Pie.

The Roman Pie, top right in the picture here, is a stuffed-crust pizza filled with potatoes, sausage, pepperoni, and cheese. I'd never had anything like it - it was very good, and quickly became one of Lynnafred's favorites.

The New York pizza was absolutely perfect - a hand-stretched water crust, perfectly crisped on the bottom with just the right amount of char, and yet maintaining the ideal amount of chewiness and tenderness combined.  Take a peek at the picture on the right. That's the color of a pizza crust the way it is meant to be. Just awesome.

We also ordered a meatball grinder and kept it simple with sauce, meatballs, and cheese on a 12-inch roll. It came out of the oven nicely toasted, crammed with eight huge handmade meatballs and dressed with tomato sauce and melted cheese. Maryanne and I cut it in half to share because it was more than enough for the both of us. The meatballs  were very much like the ones my Italian grandmother used to make, though she used to put Romano cheese in hers and Villa Milano doesn't. The texture was very good, and I wouldn't be surprised if they made their meatballs with a pork and beef blend.

One other thing: No trip to Villa Milano would be complete without an order of their garlic knots. They are absolutely stunning - little knots of the tenderest yeasty dough, baked up golden brown and delicious with melted butter and garlic. There are six knots in an order for two bucks. After our first time there, we've always made sure to get a double order to go. Most of them make it all the way home. The ones that don't get eaten right away reheat nicely in the toaster oven for a garlicy morning breakfast treat.

So: Villa Milano. Great place for authentic New York pizza without driving to New York.
456 Main Street
East Hartford, CT 06118
860-568-4898
860-568-4899

You can check out their menus here.

I Had Douchebag Pizza For Lunch

More specifically, I had Red Baron Thick Pan Pepperoni Pizza for lunch.

Hey, check this out: It's EXCLUSIVELY PREPARED!
What the hell does that even mean?

I decided to try it because I am inexplicably fond of Red Baron's small deep-dish pizzas (the ones that come in twin packs.) They're not anything like a "good pizza," but there is something about the cracker-like shell crust and slightly strange-flavored sauce that appeals to me.  So how bad could a "Thick Pan" pizza be, right?

Well, I will say this about the Thick Pan pizza: in real life, it looks exactly like the photo on the package. I'm sure you've seen enough box-cover-art "Serving Suggestions" to know how rare that is. The sauce and pepperoni were also exactly what I expected: fairly decent pepperoni (spicy and just a little greasy) and sauce that had a slightly strange flavor heavy on the oregano and kind of light on the tomato flavor. 

And dat crust. The cardboard platform on which it was cooked in the microwave is coated with that gray stuff that makes things in the microwave get browned. So the crust had a nice crispy browned bottom, and it tasted just like the thin and crunchy deep-dish crusts that the small Red Baron pizzas have. But it was thick, soft, and a little spongy, more like a cheap bread than a real crust. I know I wasn't going to get a primo New Haven pie here, but even at that I found it somewhat substandard. If you like a thick, soft crust, you might want to try out the Red Baron Pizza. I probably won't buy it again.

So why, you may ask, did I call it "Douchebag Pizza?"  Check out the box art. It's covered with pictures of douchebags. "HEY GUYS! It's the Baron! Looking for douche food? Well, you're in luck!"

Mama Cozzi's Mexican Style Pizza by ALDI

Among the many different varieties of frozen pizza available at ALDI under their Mama Cozzi's brand are two Mexican-inspired versions that you might want to check out.

Tuesdays are often Taco Tuesday in my house; we make up a pan of seasoned ground beef, and then we all build our own tacos using a variety of ingredients and toppings. We have a great time, and eat great tacos. But sometimes, for a change of pace, we throw a couple of Mama Cozzi's Mexican Style frozen pizzas in the oven instead. It takes about the same amount of time to prepare, and it's almost as much fun.

The Chicken Fajita pizza (shown in the picture at left as slightly overbrowned on the edge, oops) is pretty good. Thin, crispy crust topped with taco sauce, roasted chicken strips, red, green, and yellow peppers, shredded cheeses, and red onion. Tasty. Not perfectly like a chicken fajita, mind you, but Mexican-styled enough in its own way that we enjoy it.

The Taco Seasoned Pizza is very authentic, with seasoned ground beef, shredded cheeses, green and red peppers, sliced black olives, and chopped onion on a taco-sauced thin crust. It's delicious, and it keeps the "taco" in "Taco Tuesday."

Both of these are available on a rotating  basis at your local ALDI store. Regular ALDI shoppers know that products there come and go, but usually return. If your local ALDI doesn't have them, ask the store manager when they're supposed to come back.

Mama Cozzi's Mega Meat Pizza

As promised on the box

I'm not a big fan of frozen pizza. There are too many genuinely good pizzerias in my area and too many fairly decent "take and bake" refrigerated pies in the supermarket for frozen pizzas to compete. Let's face it - when the majority of the frozen pizzas out there are on the horrid level of Mama Celeste or the equally nasty faux-gourmet crap of California Pizza Kitchen, you can see why I hardly ever look to the freezer case for a pizza fix.

And then yesterday I'm walking by the freezer cases at ALDI, and I saw this Mama Cozzi's Mega Meat Ultimate Five Meat Pizza box gazing up at me.  Props to the food stylist and photographer who worked on that label: that photo was irresistable. Seriously. It practically made my mouth water just looking at it.  And since we've had other Mama Cozzi's pizzas (the aforementioned take-and-bakes) without being disappointed,  Maryanne and I decided to give it a try.

As delivered from the oven.

For the most part, this pizza totally delivered on the photo's promise. There was capicola, pepperoni, sausage, "beef pizza topping (beef-and-TVP blend)," and bacon along with a decent amount of mozzarella and parmesan cheese.  The oven-rising crust was crispy on the bottom and pleasantly doughy below the sauce; not the type of pizza a New Haven pizza diehard would go for, but roughly comparable to a Western Massachusetts pizza crust (i.e. kind of halfway between a New Haven and a Sicilian style crust.)

Way better than the average frozen pizza, and under four bucks. Quite a deal. 

Mama Cozzi's Pizza Kitchen Pizza at ALDI

In the mood for pizza, but not really in the mood to wait around for takeout, I swung by ALDI and bought a couple of their Mama Cozzi brand ready-to-bake 'zas for supper the other night. I picked up two 16-inchers: one pepperoni and one "four meat" for a total of about $15.

Just like with many other ALDI items, Mama Cozzi's pizza is pretty good, especially when judged fairly for what it is.  There's no way it would ever compare with the awesomeness of a Frank Pepe New Haven pizza, for example.  It's not as good as most neighborhood pizzas (notice I said "most." There are lots of really bad neighborhood pizza joints out there.)  But in comparison to the fast-food crap they sell at Domino's, Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, or Papa Johns you'll be pleasantly surprised by both the lower price and far superior quality of the Mama Cozzi product over those ketchup-on-cardboard creations.

The "four meat" pizza, advertised as including pepperoni, sausage, bacon, and "seasoned beef," was better than I thought it was going to be from the looks.  The crust was thinnish and baked crispy on the bottom with some breadiness above (a nice balance,) generously spread with sauce, and had plenty of meat in every bite.  The pepperoni and bacon tended to get a little lost against the sausage and beef, but the overall flavor was better than average.

The pepperoni was my favorite of the two, though.  Covered with both slices and diced bits of pepperoni, the pizza was spicy and delicious. The pepperoni used was zesty and of high quality and I was favorably impressed.

These pizzas are never going to win awards, and I doubt anyone would choose one of them over a family-owned non-national-chain-produced pizza.  But I would certainly go with Mama Cozzi over Pizza Hut, any day.

Clam & Bacon Pizza

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Ocean Queen canned smoked scallops.  I thought at the time that they'd be a great ingredient on a seafood pizza (specifically, a bacon/scallop/anchovy/clam pizza.)  So I made one.

I made a standard batch of pizza dough and set it aside to rise (it's in the background in the picture at left) and assembled the other ingredients:  Ferrara pizza sauce (a snappy and well-seasoned tomato sauce,) a jar of anchovy fillets in olive oil, a can of Ocean Queen smoked scallops, and a can of Bar Harbor Foods littleneck clams.

After the crust had risen for about an hour, I spread it with the sauce and sprinkled it with little chunks of fresh basket cheese and a light scattering of mozzarella.  Then I topped it with pieces of cooked (but not crispy) bacon, a few anchovies arranged like spokes radiating from the center of the pie, and the scallops and clams, properly distributed.  A heavier scattering of mozzarella followed, and it was into the oven for about 15 minutes at 500 F.  The high temperature is essential for a decent crust, and also makes the bacon crispy and gives the cheese a light golden brown finish - just the degree of doneness I love on a pizza.

Now, I know that it's pretty much traditional for food bloggers to present their creations and then write about how amazing and awesome and delicious everything was, but I have to admit to being a little disappointed with the results.  Theoretically, this pizza should have been THE MIGHTY SEAFOOD PIZZA - all the flavors were complimentary to one another, the crust came out great, and Ferrrara sauce can hold its own against most pizzeria sauces.  This should have been a home run.  But truth be told, it just wasn't.  The seafood flavors were far too overwhelming; next time I get a craving for this kind of pizza, I'll leave out either the scallops or the clams - I'm almost certain it was one or the other that pushed the final result over the edge.

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Mama Miro's Restaurant, Enfield CT

Mama Miro's, on Hazard Avenue (CT Rt 190) in Enfield is a recently-opened Italian restaurant and pizza joint. After hearing good things about the food and service from friends, my wife and I decided to give it a try last weekend. We weren't disappointed.

From the outside, the building looks barely large enough to hold a commercial kitchen - much less a full restaurant - but looks can be deceiving. Inside, Mama Miro's is cozy and inviting, with lots of warm wood tones, ten roomy and comfortable tables, and an open view of the pizza prep area and ovens. We were greeted as we walked in by owner and hostess Kathy Miro, who offered us a menu and chatted with us as we made our selections.

The menu has a decent variety. The appetizers are fairly standard (fried mozzarella with sauce, chicken tenders, cheese fries, garlic bread, calamari, etc.) but there are a lot to choose from, and the salad selection shows quite a bit of variety for such a small place. The pizza menu highlights 16 different specialty pizzas, or you can "build your own." There's also a wide variety of "Italian sandwiches," which in most of New England are normally called grinders. On Mama Miro's menu, though, they're called heros, probably a reflection of New York origins. The prices are reasonable, especially on the kid's menu (for 12 and under) - all kid's meals are $5.50 and include an 8-ounce soda.

We wanted to get sort of a general idea of what the food was like, so we ordered Mama's Sampler for an appetizer (chicken tenders, beer-battered onion rings, fried ravioli, fried mozzarella with sauces) and a World's Fair Pizza (fresh mozzarella, pepperoni, sweet sausage, mushrooms, peppers, meatballs, bacon, olives, and onions.) We always try to get an appetizer like fried mozz when we're trying a pizza place for the first time. Not very exciting, I know, but it's usually served with a dipper of the house marinara sauce, and the quality of the marinara is usually a good indicator of the overall qualtiy of the food.

After a few minutes, Karen came to our table and told us that they were out of chicken tenders on the Mama's Sampler - would we mind if they subbed Buffalo wings? We agreed immediately, and I was glad we did. We got five big, meaty wings in an excellent mildly hot sauce which I enjoyed for what it was: a well-balanced blend of vinegar and sweet with a spicy kick that my non-chilehead wife thought was pretty hot (hahaha.) The two fried cheese ravioli in the sampler were huge and tender and lightly breaded with seasoned crumbs. They quickly became a favorite of my daughter. The fried mozzarella was a generous slice of loaf mozzarella, equal to perhaps three mozzarella "sticks" as served by most other places. That made it harder to share, but it also allowed a more delicate crumb coating, since the bigger piece of cheese was less likely to get too melty in the fryer and burst out all over the plate. And the marinara sauce that was offered for dipping was very good - fresh-tasting and tangy and nicely spiced. The only thing that was less-than-optimal were the beer-battered onion rings, which we thought were a little too heavy with oil. Maybe the fry-o-lator wasn't hot enough?

Our pizza was great as well. We were pleased by the New York-style thin crust, which held up well under the toppings and didn't get too soft in the center. There was a generous amount of toppings as well. The sausage was flavorful and the meatballs very much like homemade.

Their weakness, however, is speed of service. On our first visit, our pizza had come out of the oven ten minutes before our sampler had even hit the fryers. On other visits, we're routinely had to wait 45 minutes, even for simple grinders.

We'll go back again because the food is good, but we plan to call in our order first.

Mama Miro's Pizzeria Restaurant
117 Hazard Avenue
Enfield CT 06082
860-265-3800
FAX: 860-265-3801

Lunch and dinner, delivery available.

Mama Miro's didn't have a website at the time of this review.

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Microwave vs. Oven: Frozen Pizza

I admit, I'm not a big fan of microwave ovens. I have one in my kitchen, like just about everyone else, but I don't put it to much use - heating frozen or canned vegetables, mostly. I hate the texture most things get when they're "cooked" in the microwave, and I don't think that the savings in time is worth the dramatic decrease in quality of the finished product.

Recently, though, some companies have introduced recipe changes in their manufactured prepared foods that have made products better suited for microwaves. Pot pies, for example. I used to hate pot pies cooked in the microwave because the crusts came out so badly. But recently, Banquet and Marie Callendar pot pies seem to have tweaked the way their crusts are made - I honestly couldn't tell the difference between a microwaved and a baked pot pie the last time I had them.

And that got me to thinking about frozen pizzas. When I was a kid, frozen pizzas were the bottom of the frozen-food barrel. Nasty in all ways - the crusts were flavorless cardboard, the sauce was cheap, acidic, and rarely seasoned with anything but too much oregano, and the cheese was like plastic. Nowadays, though, there are some really decent frozen pizzas out there. Just about all of them are better when cooked in a conventional oven, though.

The first time I ever tried heating frozen pizza in a microwave, it was a Celeste Pizza For One. Even given the generally low quality of Celeste pies to begin with, it was horrible. The cheese was hard and brownish-yellow, the crust leathery and unchewable, and enough of the moisture had evaporated from the sauce to render it into a kind of tangy red tar. Microwaves were just getting wide acceptance then, and food companies were starting to adapt their products to this new way of ruining dinner.

This week, with Celeste Pizzas For One selling for a dollar each at the local Stop & Shop, I picked up a couple of them and decided to do a head-to-head comparison of cheap frozen pizzas cooked in the microwave and in a conventional oven. I picked the Pepperoni variety and followed the package directions to the letter.

Microwave Instructions: Remove frozen pizza and microwave disk from carton; unwrap. For best results, do not add additional toppings. Cetner disk, silver side up, on microwave-save plate. Place frozen pizza on disk. Place plate in microwave oven. Microwave on HIGH (100%) power 3½ to 4½ minutes, or until most of the cheese is melted, rotating ¼ turn after 2 minutes. Carefully remove pizza from oven. Loosen pizza from disk with spatula.

Result: The package instructions were clear and easy to follow, and did produce a somewhat evenly-heated and acceptable pizza. The cheese melted well but also tended to dehydrate a bit, leaving it translucent and stiff. And because the microwave made the sauce bubble up from the crust, the already-stingy application of cheese looked even less generous as it became hidden beneath a layer of bubble-pocked redness.

The microwave disk definitely helped make the crust crispy, and it was far better than that first one years ago, but it's clear they have a long way to go here. The edges were crunchy, but coming in from the edges the crust was dense and tough, and parts here and there were dehydrated.

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Conventional Oven Instructions: Place baking sheet on center oven rack; preheat oven to 400F. Remove frozen pizza from carton; unwrap. Place frozen pizza on PREHEATED baking sheet. Bake 11 to 13 minutes or until center cheese is melted and crust edge is golden brown. For extra crisp crust: Place frozen pizza directly on center oven rack. Bake as directed.

Result: The cheese was much more evenly melted, without and dehydrated, plasticy areas. The sauce stayed put, bubbling a bit but not pushing its way up through the cheese. Parts of the cheese got golden brown on the surface.

The crust was much nicer on the baked pizza - crispy, but also flaky and tender, with a toasted edge. Although not as agressively crunchy as the microwaved version, it was pleasantly toasted around the edges.

One other thing I noticed: I timed the cooking phase so that each pizza would come out of the oven and be served at the same time. Both of the pies were cooked exactly to package specifications, and yet the microwaved pizza got cold faster than the conventionally-cooked one. I've noticed this in other microwaved foods as well, and it's another reason why I don't use the microwave very often.

Conclusion:

Celeste Pizza For One is still a pretty crappy frozen pizza, even if frozen pizzas themselves have gotten better over the years.

Link:

Pinnacle Food Group, Inc. holds the Celeste frozen pizza brand. The number of other familiar brands they own might surprise you.

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DaBertos Pizza Shells

Seems like I never go to Big Lots! without finding something interesting to eat. Like these DaBertos Thin and Crispy Pizza Crusts. So obscure that they are virtually unknown on the internet, the rather ugly purple-and-gold packaging contains three six-inch pizza crusts and a 4-ounce pouch of pizza sauce (the customer provides any other toppings.) Job lot store pizza! Really, how could I resist?

The pizza crusts are really interesting. Dense, quarter-inch-thick disks of semi-moist bread; they have a strong yeasty smell and look like they were die-cut from vast sheets of partially-baked flatbread. The bottom side is riddled with small holes at 1-inch intervals, sort of like a giant saltine cracker without the salt. Following the package directions, I brushed each crust lightly with a bit of olive oil before spreading it with a third of the contents of the sauce pouch. To my surprise, the sauce was actually pretty good commercial pizza sauce: Not as thick as tomato paste, but with a good thick body; not too sweet; a good bouquet of herbs like oregano, marjoram, and basil; a touch of garlic. I topped each sauced disk with a generous sprinkling of finely shredded mozzarella and a few slices of pepperoni, then slid them into a 425 F oven for the recommended 8 minutes. Victory! Three delicious little pizzas - one each for my wife, my daughter, and me - each with a thin, flaky, and very crispy cracker-style crust.

Ordinarily, I'm a fan of the thin-but-not-crispy style crust on New Haven and NY style pizzas. But every now and then, I really enjoy a thin and crunchy crust. Most of the time, I buy a cheap-ass frozen pizza to fulfill that kind of craving. The down side, of course, is that I also get cheap-ass frozen pizza sauce that tastes like tomato juice and pencil shavings, and crappy grade-D cheese when I do that. DaBertos gave me the crunchy crust along with some very tasty sauce, and then left the quality of the other ingredients entirely up to me. Not gourmet dining, to be sure, but it hit the spot in that strange way that only cheap refrigerator-case pizza can provide.

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Enzo's Brick Oven Pizza, East Longmeadow MA

Edit, 2 September 2011:  Enzo's Brick Oven Pizza is CLOSED and the storefront is vacant.  I have no information about what happened to them or whether the owners will be opening another restaurant elsewhere.

Enzo's Brick Oven Pizza shares a small building with a storefront KFC on the corner of Shaker Road and Chestnut in East Longmeadow MA. The KFC is widely known for it's exceptionally slow service, and it's usually empty. Enzo's is known for decent pizza and there's usually a steady stream of customers, even in a small town like East Longmeadow with five other pizza places nearby.

Inside, the atmosphere is cozy and friendly. A lighted menu board facing the door highlights some of the non-pizza offerings of the restaurant, while a huge chalkboard display behind the counter details lunch menus, grinders, and pizza varieties. The back page of the menu also features a long list of "regional" pizza toppings that can be ordered. They've got a great variety and it goes far beyond the usual peppers/onion/pepperoni/sausage House Specials of other places.

Service is quick and friendly, and there's no more than the normal 15 or 20-minute wait while an ordered pizza is assembled and baked. While we waited for our take-out, we had an order of fried mozzarella sticks which were brought out quickly. They were pretty standard frozen breaded cheese sticks deep-fried to order, but the real reason we got them was to taste the marinara sauce that came along with it. It was very good, nicely seasoned, and tasted like it had been made there rather than poured from a jar. Quite nice.

The pizza was excellent, and was indeed a reasonable "New York Style" pizza, with a thin but not crispy crust. The toppings were plentiful and well-balanced, with a great tangy sauce and the right amount of cheese. Overall, we were very pleased with it, and we'll certainly go back again.

There's just one thing: Don't go there expecting a real "brick oven" pizza. You won't find a coal-fired brick oven here like you would at a place like Frank Pepe's. Enzo's "brick oven" is a standard pizza oven with a fake brick facade around it.

Enzo's Brick Oven Pizza
CLOSED
238 Shaker Rd
East Longmeadow, MA 01028
(413) 525-8462‎

Enzo's didn't have a website at the time this post was written.

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Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, Manchester CT

Back in October 2008, I wrote about the famous Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana on Wooster Street in New Haven CT. It's an iconic pizza restaurant and a genuine "destination dining spot" for people all over the Northeast. And now I can get their great New Haven pizza a lot closer to home, at the new Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana in Manchester CT.

The outside bears little resemblance to the brick storefront original, and the surroundings are certainly different, plopped upon a retail pad site in the Buckland Hills shopping development that includes dozens of stand-alone commercial buildings clustered around the mammoth Shoppes At Buckland Hill mall. Inside the door, though, the Pepe aura is strong.

Just as in New Haven, prospective diners wait in a small foyer until a booth becomes available inside, and when the foyer fills up (as it did the day we were there) one is required to wait outside. This caused a good deal of grumbling among the Northern Connecticut people who were unaccustomed to the way Pepe's does things, and who were left standing in the cold December air outside. But wait times here are short and no one had to spend very much time outdoors after all.

Inside, we found that they've replicated the New Haven coal-fired pizza oven, virtually brick by brick, right down to the cast iron doors and hinges. Spaghetti-board menus, roomy booths, white walls, and black tin ceilings all evoke the 1920's charm of the original restaurant. No one would ever be able to completely duplicate the original Pepe's with its patina of age and comfort, but the owners of the Manchester branch have done a very good job of capturing the atmosphere and ambiance of the original, right down to the old-fashioned six-ounce beverage glasses and Foxon Park birch beer.

But let's face it: Who cares about atmosphere when you're there to get a great pizza? And I am happy to relate that the pizzas from the the Manchester brick oven are every bit as delicious as the ones from New Haven. We had a pepperoni pie and a spinach and bacon pie, and they were perfect. Unfortunately, I was unable to get my favorite, the fresh clam pie, because a breaking winter storm that day had prevented that day's clam delivery. Maybe next time!

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Frank Pepe's Manchester location is at 221 Buckland Hills Drive, Manchester CT, to the left of the La-Z-Boy showroom (they share a parking lot.) They're open every day from 11:30 am to 10:00 pm, and their phone number is 860-644-7333. Click here for directions.

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Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, New Haven

Italian food is ubiquitous in American cuisine, having been quite thoroughly assimilated in the 150 years since the first great waves of Italian immigrants arrived here in the 19th century. And no Italian food has been more thoroughly Americanized than pizza, that savory flatbread which has taken a place beside hamburgers, hot dogs, and apple pie in the American Food Hall of Fame.

For many pizza lovers, the Northeast is the capitol of American pizza, especially in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, with their large numbers of Italian-American residents. And there, almost central to this pizza-heavy region, is New Haven, where perhaps the best pizza in the US is made.

There are three amazing pizzerias in New Haven: one on State Street (Modern Apizza Place) and two on Wooster Street (Pepe's and Sally's.) Each have their strengths and weaknesses. On this visit to New Haven, we stopped at Pepe's because I'd been jonesing for a Clam Pie for months, and that's Pepe's specialty.

Pepe's is a busy place, and one nearly always has to wait in line to get in. Even though we arrived a little after 3:00 on a Friday afternoon, there were already two parties in front of us. We took a seat on one of the benches in the foyer, and it wasn't long before we were being shown to a booth.

It's not a fancy place. Founded in the mid 1920's, very little has changed in the eighty-some-odd years since Frank Pepe's first tomato pie slid into the now-famous brick oven at the back of the building. The walls are immaculate white, the roomy straight-backed booths finished in black, which matches the painted tin ceilings. Brass numbers on the walls identify each booth. And the menu is simple: pizza, in three sizes (small, medium, large) topped as desired from the choices posted on the wall.

Each of us ordered a different small pizza to get a taste across the spectrum. My wife Maryanne got a pepperoni/mozzarella, my daughter Lynn a spinach/bacon/mozzarella, and I ordered a clam pie with anchovies.

A small pizza at Pepe's is a 10-inch pie if you ask your waitress. What actually comes out of the oven is somewhat larger, however. New Haven style pizza has a very thin crust and is irregular in shape. At Pepe's, each pie is hand-formed, topped, and slid into the superhot coal-fired brick oven on a long-handled wooden pizza peel. Maryanne's pepperoni pie was topped with tiny, delicious slices of pepperoni, the perfect amount of mozzarella cheese, and the barest kiss of tomato sauce featuring pieces of flavorful fresh tomatoes. Lynn's spinach/bacon pizza was similarly perfect, with the same spare spread of tomato sauce, a touch of mozzarella, crisp pieces of thick-sliced bacon, and green stretches of chopped spinach. The thin crusts were soft near the center of the pies, but crunchy-crisp along the edges. Because of the high heat of the oven, crusts generally come out somewhat darker than the mediocre chain-store pizzas so many people order from huts or dot-covered tiles. The smokey, crunchy, almost-burnt crusts are a special treat all by themselves. Lynn, who has eaten pizza from NYC to Boston and all points in between, said that hers was probably the best pizza she has ever tasted. Maryanne praised her pepperoni pizza as well even though she prefers a thicker Connecticut Valley style crust.

As delicious as their pizzas were, however, I reserve special praise for the clam pie. There is nothing at all like it. The crust is lightly brushed with a bit of olive oil, then sprinkled with chopped garlic, freshly shucked clams, grated hard Italian cheeses, and a light sprinkle of dried herbs. It's simply amazing, and well worth the drive downstate from our home near the Massachusetts state line. I added anchovies for an extra fishy bump, but I'll leave them off next time; as much as I love anchovies, the salt kick was a little strong when combined with the grated cheese.

Link:
Frank Pepe Pizzaria Napoletana's website

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