The Big (Apple) Easy
St. Charles Avenue Magazine Food Column, September, 2004
By Michael Depp

This begins in a pizzeria, which is always a sign of hope. (There are exceptions to this, of course: Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing" comes to mind.) Let me bring you into the moment: Here we are, six of us and more joining, snugly packed into a wraparound booth, encircling a steamy pie and somewhere well into the last third of a $5 pitcher of Abita beer, cocktails and wine are passed around, too. (This is a New Orleans story.) Split Enz leads a parade of mildly alternative 80s bands on the stereo, and then behold as the food writer's spirit begins to dissociate from his body, slowly floating above the pizza until he is dreamily looking down at its oozy, marbled landscape of prosciutto, goat cheese and olives, such is his happiness.

After all, I have waited 12 years for this: A New York pizzeria experience has come to my adopted city, warmly enveloping and (as it turns out) consistently reliable with its crispy, cornmeal-peeled crust and zesty sauce. Only now there's the added kick of the full bar (the $5 Abita pitchers radiating good karma from it) and the pizza-related ephemera - Italian ices, gelatos, egg creams - that you might find piecemeal in some N.Y. pizza parlors but never all in one place. And all of this from the people who brought us Juan's Flying Burrito, itself a little piece of Williamsburg right in the Lower Garden District. Alas, Slice is here, and things are suddenly just a little bit better.

So this is a story of how New York found its way into New Orleans or, more precisely, how little bits and pieces of it can be cobbled together for urban consolation comfort food. This is food for tall buildings and the city birdsong of car horns and 24-hour AM news radio with traffic and weather updates on the eights. Though this is a subjective story, of course (we all make our own New York out of the pieces - or pizzas - we find).

So, other things I've found (pertaining to pizza): The water source does not matter. It is possible to be too careful when making a pizza. (Relax: It's pizza, not terrine of foie gras.)

This from Nino Bongiorno, owner and proprietor of Café Nino in Uptown, late of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and resolute enemy of "make-believe pizzas by make-believe Italians." Bongiorno's moral authority comes from the fact that he is neither make-believe Italian (he is a transplant here by means of marriage - a life sentence) nor does he produce make-believe pizzas. His restaurant is a minimally converted former Steak and Egg Kitchen, an exercise in design understatement and functional necessity. Booths are spartan with little wicker baskets of napkins as the tables' only adornment. Commercial-free FM hit marathons play a little too loudly (buttressed by 15-minute jags of commercials). And there is Bongiorno behind a counter lined with pies sold by the slice ($1.80, if you're asking), manning the ovens with the kind of mechanical, methodical manner that only comes with:

"Experience." Which is the only thing that makes great pizza, he says. "Experience. The water has nothing to do with it whatsoever. You think the water in Brooklyn is better than this?"

He reaches into the over with his long wooden paddle to peel out a pie. Nino, what do you use for the peel? Flour? Cornmeal?

"Nothing. Experience."

He shrugs off those who make their pizzas from recipes; they are the nervous and fidgety little accountants of the pizza world. They fear risk, and so are doomed to failure.

The pizza landscape notwithstanding, there are other things we can cobble together here to bring New York a little closer. Some are small, and you can try them safely at home. Exhibit A: the egg cream. All you need is milk, seltzer water and Fox's U-Bet Chocolate Syrup (accept no substitutes - you can find this at any Sav-A-Center, and it was practically invented for this purpose alone). Take about a quarter cup of milk, add two generous tablespoons of Fox's U-Bet and fill the rest of glass with seltzer. Close your eyes, drink and you can easily imagine yourself at a table in Katz's Delicatessen, all those "Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army" signs dangling above your head.

Exhibit B: Boar's Head cold cuts. Having spent years stuffing my luggage with wax paper-wrapped Boar's Head turkey sandwiches on poppy seed rolls on return trips from New York, I nearly doubled over to find them in a local deli just a couple of years ago. New Orleanians can find Boar's Head at places like Langenstein's and Dorignac's - not the whole, expansive line, mind you, but enough to get you by with necessities like turkey, ham and bologna. Occasionally, you can even find the heavenly bacon, the tangy honey mustard or the horseradish sauce. And more might be coming soon according to Bob Failla, a recent Brooklyn transplant to Mandeville, where he runs Gulf South North Shore Deli Provisions, the area's sole distributor of Boar's Head.

"We have to first get people accustomed to the brand," he says with a familiar Brooklyn lean on his vowels. "But people down here do get it, because they appreciate good food."

What people get a little less of here, unfortunately, is the ubiquity of deli culture one finds in New York, where white aproned men can slice a pound of turkey for you before you can finish reading the headlines of The New York Post. But Failla is fighting the good fight to get brand awareness and more products (the specialty turkeys, the roast beefs, the chickens!) into the city over the next six months.

Exhibit C (for which you must leave home): Surrey's. Now, there's nothing explicitly New York about Surrey's Juice Bar and Café in the Lower Garden District, but bear with me a moment. There is simply no better place in this city (and I have looked) to bring a hangover and a Sunday New York Times to make things right again with both your mind and body. The coffee is serviceable, the juice is pricey but almost always pitch perfect and it is the only place I've yet found that can put together an egg and bagel sandwich that doesn't make you question your belief in a higher power.

Now, this brings us into something vast and controversial in and of itself - the local bagel. Tomes can and should be written on the subject of our deficits (or lack thereof, depending on who you talk to) in that area. But it's just a little too chewy to get into here, and I'd rather leave things on the affirmative note on which I began. So I'll draw your attention back to Slice, where Morrissey is now lamenting his love life on the stereo, another pitcher of Abita has just arrived and the smell of reliable, unfussy pizzas is wafting through the air, threatening again to carry the food writer up to the ceiling in a cloud of uncomplicated urban joy.