A Slice of Heaven

How can I adequately describe New York? When I lived here as a child, I found it marvelous, magical, and frustrating. Today, I find it marvelous, magical and frustrating.

As a child, I didn’t go out to restaurants. More on that in a minute.

But yesterday I had to make a couple of choices: how best to arrange my day around several cab rides? It didn’t help that all the weather sources available were predicting the same thing: heavy rain.

It seems that weathermen are scarcely better than those who pull the handles of VLTs. The morning was cloudy, but the afternoon was spotless. And herein lies a tale.

New York is great. Downtown is amazing. But something you will soon find is that no matter how sunny it is in the sky, you will almost never see the sun. Everything is perpetually in shadow. It’s bizarre, to say the least. You can walk twenty blocks and never see the sun in a cloudless sky.

Once I got past that, I hopped a cab to where I used to live, on E. 76th St. and York. Everything was shrunken from what I remembered (I was ten.) Gentrified. There was a doorman at the building in which I used to live. There were no doormen when I was a kid.

Then, it was Ground Zero. Somehow, had to do that. To add to the list of weirdities, I found myself discussing 9/11 with a Chadian taxi dude who was in Darfur on 9/11. In New Yorkese.

The site itself was disappointing—nothing really to see, just a vast construction zone. But the cabbie brought it all home as he pointed down to the end of a large gap between a bunch of buildings: “See where all that empty space is? That’s where the World Trade Center used to be.”

And then, the crowning glory: Luzzo’s. It is rarely given to this misbegotten scribbler’s soul to experience a piece of heaven, but it was experienced on this night. If I had the money to expend on a plane ticket a day, it would be from Montreal to New York, and Luzzo’s every night onwards for the rest of my days.

We were a party of 8, but it seemed like a party for 200. None of us was from New York. None of us had ever eaten at Luzzo’s. But suddenly, Matteo, our server, was quickly our new best friend (and to the ladies, their new eye magnet.)

I quickly glommed onto the Pizza Dudes, a trio of hard-working men who were just steps from our table, whirling huge discs of flour and water and shoving things into furnaces.

When our first pizza came out—the Martha, with bufalo mozzarella, truffles and prosciutto, the entire table fell silent. After two or three bites, the murmurs were unanimous: this was the best pizza we had eaten in our entire lives. Unanimous. It was on a level several orders of magnitude above anything I have ever eaten. All by these three young dudes behind the counter (see video to follow.)

Crispy. Succulent. Cheesy. Burnt/not burnt. Buttery. Smoky. Chunky. Spicy/not spicy. Tomatoey. Something . . . as one very happy female member of our crowd mentioned, she would go down on her knees for the creator of this pie, and not for the reasons you would assume. And she willingly confided this to me, a perfect stranger until a half hour before.

And this was before we had the Arugula (tomato, mozzarella, prosciutto, shaved parmiggiano cheese, arugula.) I swear, I will never look at this humble green the same way again.

I tried to give the pizza men a twenty in lieu of a nice bottle of wine (they insisted they couldn’t drink on duty) and they finally accepted it. I only wish that that twenty could pay for the supreme pizza knowledge that those three guys hold within their skulls. If it were just a money issue, it would have been thousands.

The memory of those pies lies inexorably entwined within the dendrites and axons in my brain. I will never have another pizza that approaches this until I again sit down at a table in Luzzo’s.

But that’s just my opinion.

Back to Montreal today, and a checkin bag full of memories.