It was a perfunctory muddle of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage and olive. We ordered the house salad in a feeble stab at healthiness. Now I switched to Foxon Park's Gassosa, a lemon-lime sparkler much friendlier to food. I hadn't gulped that antiseptic sting of wintergreen since childhood. At Modern, I'd tried the legendary birch soda from Foxon Park, the preferred beverage brand in these parts. The guy pulling pies out of the oven's black window occasionally rested the handle of his 14-foot-long peel on a hook hung from the ceiling.Īlmost as soon as we touched down at our table, the server asked if we knew what we wanted to order. Once inside, I stood under the neon sign proclaiming "The Original Tomato Pies," staring at the massive brick oven whose white tiles have long faded to a besmirched yellow. We lingered in the foyer with a large family driving through from Salt Lake City the father had read about Pepe's (which opened its first location next door in 1925) in a guidebook. Just before noon, we snagged the last spot in Pepe's parking lot, watched over by a wizened codger that few would dare mess with.
I ate no bad pizza that day, though my favorites were easy enough to rank.
Rather than sampling the same toppings at each place in an attempt at pseudo-scientific analysis, I instead ordered each establishment's signature pies. I'll skip the origins and lexicons, then, and simply recap my experiences through the five area pizzerias with the largest reputations. The merits of New Haven-style pizza are well documented: Eater published a definitive guide in March as part of Pizza Week 2014. That's a popular opinion, and one I agreed with by the end of the day, though of course I needed to find out for myself. "Sally's and Pepe's are the best," he pronounced, reaching for a slice with clams and bacon. The oldest one, who is 10, went straight to the box that read "The Original Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana." Then he looked up at me, his eyes set in an appraising squint. The trio swarmed the dining table and started flipping open the cardboard tops. "Look, kids-apizzas!" said MaryLee, pronouncing the last word as locals do: ah-beetz. We delivered them eight boxes worth of leftovers. She was raised in New Haven and now lives in nearby Wallingford with her husband and three children. After a friend and I bulldozed through four New Haven area pizzerias on a recent Saturday afternoon, we dropped in on one of my dear pals from college, MaryLee.