Restaurant Review the New York Slice That Slices Through Tradition at Mamaã¢â‚¬â„¢s Too
Restaurant Review
The New York Slice That Slices Through Tradition, at Mama's Too
- Mama'due south Likewise
- NYT Critic'southward Pick
- ★
- Pizza
- $
- 2750 Broadway
- 212-510-7256
For near of its fourth dimension on earth, the New York slice has not been seen as a production that needed tinkering. Yes, pizza in the city has been accessorized with toppings from crayfish (not bad) to Buffalo chicken (hmm) to Caesar salad (no, no, no, no, no). Merely the foldable, portable triangles of cheese, sauce and dough themselves were generally held to be a natural resource that was perfect as is, much like the soft, unfiltered metropolis tap water claimed to be the source of their excellence. Some pizzerias try to brand a better slice. Very few endeavour to make a unlike slice.
Mama's Too makes a unlike slice. It combines some of the near appealing elements of a Neapolitan pie with the most satisfying aspects of the archetypal product sold on newspaper plates from sidewalk windows. Information technology is as if Frank Tuttolomondo, the possessor and pie builder of this informal but very serious pizzeria on the Upper Due west Side, has learned how to genetically modify pizza.
The bulge of chaff at the edge of what Mama's Too calls the "house piece" is brown, more rough than smooth and baked to a ferocious crackle. You could tear it off and enjoy it on its ain, or maybe with butter or olive oil, merely equally you can with the best Neapolitans. Yet the flat layer of crust on the bottom is house, without the soupy center of the Neapolitan style. True to New York form, you can hold it in the air past the curved rim and information technology will stay flat and parallel to the floor.
As they practise at Totonno's and another brick-oven pizzerias, Mr. Tuttolomondo lays the cheese down earlier the sauce. Rather than drippy, milky discs of fresh mozzarella, though, he covers the raw dough (after priming it with olive oil) in shreds of a piece-friendly multifariousness that is known in the merchandise as depression-wet mozzarella and that the rest of us telephone call pizza cheese. Over this, he ladles a few blots of tomato pulp. This helps the chaff to bake through without getting soggy, keeps the cheese from sliding off the crust, and almost of all lets yous sense of taste the tomatoes, which are very good. You could, I suppose, think of the house piece as a white pizza with tomato-sauce topping.
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After the pie comes out of the oven, Mr. Tuttolomondo sprinkles it with grated two-year-old Parmigiano-Reggiano. Basil leaves are the terminal to go on.
At this point, yous can pay, walk out the door and amble toward Broadway and 106th Street cradling your slice in a paper plate and taking bites as you go. In other words, you can have the traditional sidewalk pizza feel, but you volition exist tasting flavors you usually find merely in loftier-minded sit-down pizzerias like Sorbillo, Ops or Una Pizza Napoletana.
Those bloodhounds who follow the urban center's melted-mozzarella trail will recognize that Mama'south Too is office of a great reawakening of slice culture. Unlike brick-oven pizza, which came from Europe and relied on preindustrial engineering science, the New York slice is a lowly American hybrid. Information technology is baked in gas ovens, and the sheer number of places selling information technology suggests that information technology requires no special skill. When it is praised, we don't talk nigh its artisanal roots; we phone call it the humble piece, the street-corner slice, the slice of the common homo and woman.
The ordinary slice and its heftier cousin, the Sicilian-fashion square, were probably first rehabilitated with superior ingredients and a sophisticated understanding of baking past Best Pizza in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2010. Today, serious pizza hobbyists talk about their favorite slices by reeling off the dough'southward ascension time and hydration levels. Northward Brooklyn is yet the center of the neoclassical piece movement, with L'Industrie and Williamsburg Pizza and, nearly recently, Paulie Gee'south Slice Store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, simply the forward-thinking slice is establish in Manhattan, besides, at Scarr's on the Lower Due east Side and Corner Slice in the Gotham West Market.
The goal of the neoclassicists is, essentially, to return to the aureate age of New York takeout pizza, which survives at places similar Di Fara in Midwood, Brooklyn, i of the holy sites of the neoclassical church. Paulie Gee's Slice Shop, Scarr's and other neoclassicist joints cultivate a self-consciously vintage temper, styling their logos and signs and interiors so they await like a place where Johnny Boy and Charlie in "Hateful Streets" might accept gone for a pepperoni slice and a Coke.
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Mr. Tuttolomondo does not fetishize the past. Perhaps this is because he lived information technology. For almost 60 years his family unit has endemic a series of old-school piece joints in the neighborhood. The current incarnation is literally on a street corner, at the intersection of 106th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. It is chosen Mama'south Pizza. He didn't open Mama's Too a block away to outdo his parents; he'south bringing their product into a new era. If the neoclassicists are like the folk revivalists who collected old acoustic 78s, he is Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
When Mama's As well opened in December, it also served housemade pasta. Information technology's nevertheless on the menu board that hangs on i wall, but Mr. Tuttolomondo has stopped serving it to concentrate on pizza. Besides the house piece, he also makes squares that he sees as a marriage of rectangular Sicilian pizza with Roman pizza al taglio. The crust is much taller than the Roman style, and taller than some Sicilians, too, but information technology is airy and chewy. On the lesser it has the bronze color, the cratered surface and the pan-fried crunch of the staff of life on a grilled cheese sandwich. The edges, where the dough meets the pan, have a gold fringe of browned cheese, known among students of pizza styles as a "frico chaff." This fringe is, of course, crunchy and delicious.
The virtually impressive square is, I think, the pepperoni. Unlike most of the others, information technology incorporates tomato sauce. The mozzarella is baked until it begins to brown. The pepperoni slices are small-scale and concave, similar contact lenses made of meat. Crunchy around the rims, these little cups are one-half-filled with spicy red oil.
It may sound as if I approached this slice with absurd, analytical detachment. The truth is I ripped into it like a pack of hyenas.
The other squares tend to be white pies with toppings. Again, tomato sauce is i of the toppings. One time it'south a thick and flossy layer of vodka sauce, one of the ideas that separates Mama'due south Too from the neoclassicists. Mr. Tuttolomondo besides makes a cacio eastward pepe Sicilian pie, substantially a four-cheese pizza in which one of the cheeses is pecorino; the whole slice hums with black pepper. The square topped with Gorgonzola dolce and pears works in a way that combination frequently doesn't, although one-half a slice was enough for me.
The shop is small, and if you sit at ane of the handful of ruby-red counter stools y'all will share the small tiled flooring up forepart with neighbors waiting for takeout and delivery guys. At that place are no vintage soda refrigerators or letterboard signs, simply there is a small photograph of Robert De Niro eating pizza and a much bigger one of John Travolta in "Saturday Dark Fever," biting into his double-decker slice. The motion-picture show is in blackness and white except for the pizza. Tinted orangish and blood-red, it glows like a beacon.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/dining/mamas-too-review.html
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