Pizza Mind
Back in the Dark Ages, when I first moved to New York (okay, five years ago), there was this little pizza place a few blocks from my apartment, where the same guy was always there, all day every day, and he'd make you a fantastic pie with fresh ingredients and a hand-tossed crust, and you could take your friends there on your way back from Coney Island and wow them.
You know the pizza place I'm talking about if you care at all about pizza. Slice accepts it as a foregone conclusion that you already know all about DiFara, and about Dom DeMarco, its grizzled Italian Energizer bunny of an owner. You also know that when you go there, you can be assured that the service is going to suck, the tables are going to be dirty, and you must be patient. All this is understood, and most people know that the pizza is worth a bit of an extra wait.
But no pizza is worth what happened to us on Saturday. DiFara in the middle of the summer is a hellhole, and even that I knew going in. What I wasn't prepared for was for the oven to be spewing noxious smoke all over the restaurant, causing the air to be unbreatheable in addition to hot and stuffy. My friends all waited inside with me for the first half-hour or so, but eventually had to go outside for the second half-hour-plus. I think, by the time I got the pie, Dom's son thought I was crying about my pizza order. (I nearly was. And if that got it into my hands any sooner, then I'm okay with that.) For most of Saturday night and Sunday, I had a pretty nasty cough.
I remember the hot. I remember the stuffy. I even remember the pack of ...oh, I hate the word, so I won't say it, but it starts with an h and we have a lot of them in Brooklyn... thinking they are now part of the cognoscenti because they called Mr. DeMarco by his first name when they placed their order, and the pack of Midwood/Ditmas locals who are pissed that the pack of ...h-words have taken over their local pizza joint and who may actually be even more annoying than the h-words with their patronizing list of DiFara survival tips. (I'm not sure who I'd want to slap more - the next person who leans over the counter and says "hey, Dom, we need some more parmesan" or the next person who rolls their eyes at people in line and tells them "this is nothing. You don't know what waiting at DiFara is. Let me tell you about this one time...") But I didn't remember the smoke. And the smoke, my friends, was the straw that broke the camel's back.
The pizza? Delicious, of course. But many things are delicious. I am content to enjoy every other delicious thing in the world for the next five years or so, until every publication in the world moves on to the next great pizzeria, and then I might chance going back. I'm pretty sure it will get worse before it gets better.
You know the pizza place I'm talking about if you care at all about pizza. Slice accepts it as a foregone conclusion that you already know all about DiFara, and about Dom DeMarco, its grizzled Italian Energizer bunny of an owner. You also know that when you go there, you can be assured that the service is going to suck, the tables are going to be dirty, and you must be patient. All this is understood, and most people know that the pizza is worth a bit of an extra wait.
But no pizza is worth what happened to us on Saturday. DiFara in the middle of the summer is a hellhole, and even that I knew going in. What I wasn't prepared for was for the oven to be spewing noxious smoke all over the restaurant, causing the air to be unbreatheable in addition to hot and stuffy. My friends all waited inside with me for the first half-hour or so, but eventually had to go outside for the second half-hour-plus. I think, by the time I got the pie, Dom's son thought I was crying about my pizza order. (I nearly was. And if that got it into my hands any sooner, then I'm okay with that.) For most of Saturday night and Sunday, I had a pretty nasty cough.
I remember the hot. I remember the stuffy. I even remember the pack of ...oh, I hate the word, so I won't say it, but it starts with an h and we have a lot of them in Brooklyn... thinking they are now part of the cognoscenti because they called Mr. DeMarco by his first name when they placed their order, and the pack of Midwood/Ditmas locals who are pissed that the pack of ...h-words have taken over their local pizza joint and who may actually be even more annoying than the h-words with their patronizing list of DiFara survival tips. (I'm not sure who I'd want to slap more - the next person who leans over the counter and says "hey, Dom, we need some more parmesan" or the next person who rolls their eyes at people in line and tells them "this is nothing. You don't know what waiting at DiFara is. Let me tell you about this one time...") But I didn't remember the smoke. And the smoke, my friends, was the straw that broke the camel's back.
The pizza? Delicious, of course. But many things are delicious. I am content to enjoy every other delicious thing in the world for the next five years or so, until every publication in the world moves on to the next great pizzeria, and then I might chance going back. I'm pretty sure it will get worse before it gets better.
1 Comments:
I grew up around there (I'm in my late fifties) and still go there. But I must have no taste because while DiFara seems fine to me, it's not that great. To me, there are a number of neighborhood pizzerias that are just as good, but without the hype and the h-people.
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