Pizza in Washington: perhaps this is not the oxymoron it used to be. A lot depends on what you consider pizza to be. To aficionados, it’s important to define your terms.
To its credit, the half-hour PBS documentary dispenses with any consideration of the big chains, and this is all for the best. The narrative arc, however, ends up at points becoming an exercise in giving equal weight to a discursive listing of different sorts of pizza: the Chicago (deep dish), the New Haven, the New York, and what can be loosely termed as the traditional Italian or restrictively defined as the Denominazione di Origine Controllata (D.O.C.).
The title “Pizza in Washington” can be seen as both a premise and a conclusion, but on a deeper level is meant as the answer to its own rhetorical question. When I hear people lament that they can’t find decent pizza in the District, odds are that it’s the pizza associated with New York that they’re hankering for, not some bubbling glob of goo they scraped from some pan in northern Illinois or some chichi little plate they were served from a wood-burning stove in southern Italy. Full disclosure: raised in New York, my idea of what constitutes–what goes into, onto, and makes for–a great pizza is as provincial and orthodox as the D.O.C.
In New York, the phrase “New York style pizza” does not exist (as it would be considered tautological). Hence, pizzas comes in two basic forms, the round (Neapolitan) being the default and the rectangular (Sicilian). These are typically purchased at “pizzerias” (sometimes referred to as “pizza parlors” or “pizza places”) and are available (except for a few pretentious purveyors) by the “slice” or “piece.” There are no fancy-shmancy names given to pizza “pies” (e.g., the Margherita), only extra toppings that may be mixed and matched à la carte in what are sometimes referred to collectively as “combinations.” Meat toppings include pepperoni, meatball, and sausage. Vegetable choices are onion, mushroom, green pepper, black olive, and eggplant. Extra cheese is an option, as are the ever-controversial anchovies. Grated parmesan cheese, crushed red-pepper flakes, and garlic powder are optional condiments typically available in shakers and applied by the customers themselves.
The documentary has a tendency to reduce each of the varieties of pizza it strives to portray into place-name clichés. The narration also lends credence to many of the tiresome marketing terms used not to actually describe or differentiate pizzas but to entice the mouth-watering masses into buying pizza (the “jumbo” slice, the “brick-oven” pizza being relative and mostly meaningless terminology). Similarly, the acknowledged existence of the “thin-crust” pizza at least implies the existence of some heretofore unnamed, unheralded, and presumptively unremarkable thicker variety.
Nonetheless, the documentary clearly makes one essential point about superb pizza crusts: you need a very hot oven to produce the great blistering ones. You need a device that will get you to the 800-to-1000-degree range (no pun intended). The final words on achieving superlative pizza crusts: don’t attempt them at home in your lame 500-degree ovens.
Coincidentally, The Washington City Paper recently published its Best of D.C. 2013 issue (April 12, 2013) and therein lies in microcosm the schizophrenic taxonomy with which some Washingtonians approach pizza. The readers’ pick for Best Slice of Pizza went to Ledo Pizza (runners-up were Pete’s New Haven Style Apizza and We, the Pizza). Yet there was another category for Best Gourmet Pizza which went to 2Amys (runners-up: Pizzeria Paradiso and Matchbox). Look closely and you will also note that H &pizza won for Best Restaurant When You Pay. There still appears to be a struggle in the District to define the essence of pizza: is it a sloppy pedestrian slice, a savory patrician pie, or a satiating price point?
The bottom line: you can get decent pizza nowadays in Washington, D.C. if you know what your tastes are and where to find it. There is considerable diversity in the dining choices available in the District, just not the depth you can find in other and larger locales. It can never be the Upper Broadway of my childhood memory, where three pizzerias once stood on the corners of one intersection at West 105th Street, and the price of a slice was 25 cents.
Bagels in Washington? Don’t get me started.
Pizza in Washington | WETAAsk Americans to name their favorite foods and atop the list, invariably, is pizza. The tasty pies, which originated in Naples, Italy, come in many forms, associated with Chicago, New York, New Haven and other cities with glorious crust and sauce traditions. But what does the national capital area have to offer pizza aficionados?
