Pizza Today - May 2021 - 14

MAN ON THE STREET

SCOTT WIENER

The Rebirth of the New York Slice

ew York City's pizza scene
experienced an identity crisis over
the past decade. If you asked me
to define " New York style " pizza in the early
2000s, I would have told you it's a large,
thin, puffy-edged pizza sold by the slice
and eaten via the fold hold while standing
or walking. That's been the definition since
gas ovens outpaced coal-fired ovens by
the middle of the 20th century. But those
slice shops that once appeared on every
corner were suddenly becoming a relic.
Convenience and value had become more
important than quality.
It really hit me when tourists would
refer to wood-fired neo-Neapolitan pizzas
and the newly popular $1 slices as if they
exemplified New York style pizza. People

were more interested in the high end and
the low end, but they were ignoring the
middle.
The slice shops that came to identify
NYC had fallen out of vogue as Gotham
began to embrace styles from other cities.
We had the Neapolitan wave, a Detroit
style wave, and even a few Roman style
pizzerias. Heck, we even had a Rhode
Island style grilled pizzeria for a minute.
A city that was once known for being so
territorial and exclusionary had flipped!
On one hand I was delighted to see
such a broad embrace of foreign styles,
but on the other it felt like we were losing
an important part of NYC identity. That's
why it has been such a relief to see a new
breed of slice shop popping up these last

few years. These new pizzerias pay homage
to the classic shops that used to thrive
on every block with the addition of more
thoughtful ingredient selection and production process.
Scarr's in the Lower East Side brought
house-milled flour and organic ingredients
into the slice format. Brooklyn's L'industrie
does multi-day fermentation and tops each
slice to order. Best Pizza pulls their own
mozzarella in house. These are things we'd
only seen in artisan pizzerias, not in slice
shops.
With the stage set, the pandemic only
confirmed the return of the slice. Sit-down
joints were struggling while slice shops
flourished. I experienced the contrast this
week in Soho. I was walking away from
Lombardi's, a pizzeria that just recently
lost the lease on one of the two buildings
they rent. On the opposite corner I saw the
brand-new facade of Upside Pizza, a retrochic slice shop that uses natural fermentation for their dough. The serendipity was
almost poetic. Behind me was the skeleton
of The Before Times, in front of me was
the infant smile of the future.
Just a few short blocks away is Zazzy's,
another new slice joint that's taking advantage of cheap leases by opening multiple
locations across the city. Just like Upside,
it uses high-powered electric ovens and
makes pizza that revises the classic slice
with some much-appreciated updates. They
avoid commodity flour, practice intelligent
fermentation, and bake their pizza to the
point of light char.
As the pandemic has encouraged
outdoor dining and take-away windows,
maybe it's finally time for the rest of the
country to fully embrace slice culture. Derrick Tung just opened a Paulie Gee's Slice
Shop in Chicago and there's another one
coming to New Orleans. John Gutekanst is
opening an Avalanche slice shop in Athens,
OH. Could this be a true nationwide slice
renaissance? I can only hope!

SCOTT WIENER is the founder of Scott's Pizza Tours in New York City and SliceOutHunger.org Instagram: @scottspizzatours

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Pizza Today - May 2021

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