Slice

There was a time in my life when Slice meant a brand of thick mango juice. Today, I think only of pizza. After I moved to New York, I became obsessed with perfecting my pizza and also finding my favorite pizza spot. I think I have now done both.

I moved to New York late in 2019 and my new roommates and I quickly established a Friday night tradition. They were trying to be vegan and I was trying to be encouraging (not really) but Friday night was cheat day. They’d each order practically an entire chicken from Sticky Fingers, this great fried chicken / chicken nugget spot (or so they say) with some yummy sauces (this I can attest to) and I would get pizza or eat the fries that came on the side of their birds. Come March 2020, I switched to making a big elaborate dinner every Friday night and eventually settled on homemade pizza – dough and all.

When I was looking through my photo gallery for pictures of some of the best pizzas I’ve made, I found a blast from the past (circa May 2016). I graduated from Christ University in Bangalore on May 27th, 2016 and threw a Graduation Pizza / Pajama Party for my friends. I knew I was moving to the US in under a month and everything made me emotional. I was crying at least once a day. The last time I had hosted a Slumber Party was for my birthday a couple of months ago and I remember weeping pretty aggressively them. I had finally found friends i appreciated and who appreciated me, it wasn’t something I was willing to let go of. I was determined not to ugly cry again and if memory serves me right, I did not.

I’ve changed a lot since 2016 and one big thing that has changed is how I take my pizza. I used to love pizzas with as many veggies on them as possible and today it’s cheese and maybe one more. Boring or refined?

When I moved from Bangalore to Boston in 2016, another pizza tradition emerged. I used to work at the Writing Center from 6-9PM, every Tuesday my first year there. On my walk back from the university, I would call Prospect Pizza Cafe down the street and order a large cheese pizza with pineapple and jalapenos and pick it up on the way home. I did this every week, without fail. I think I also did this that year for Valentine’s Day (see Date Night) .

One of my favorite New York pizza traditions was the Brooklyn Pizza tour I started with my friend Caroline. We used to work together and after she quit, we established monthly pizza dates at a different well-known pizza spots in Brooklyn. We tried Lucali, Ops, Leo and Emily. Rubirosa in the West Village received an honorary mention. She set me off on a pizza exploration journey that led me to also explore Razza in Jersey City and Emmett’s in the West Village. I love sauce and bread. Toppings are great but sauce and bread maketh a good pizza. Leo in Williamsburg won the battle for me. We still try to keep up our dinner date tradition, but we’ve now pivoted to other new, hip non-pizza spots.

I can’t talk about iconic American pizzas without talking about Chuck E. Cheese. I cover restaurants at work and this includes all the fast food franchises, majority of which I can’t even eat at (except Taco Bell, the G.O.A.T). Chuck E. Cheese was filing for bankruptcy and I was doing a lot of reading since I didn’t grow up here and missed out on a chance to live through a seemingly seminal experience of the American youth. In all my readings about Chuck E. Cheese (for work, of course), I discovered that there was a popular conspiracy theory about their pizza. They allegedly re-cycled and re-heated uneaten slices and served them to new customers as a new pie. With a purple, radioactive looking rat as a mascot, this really doesn’t surprise me. They’ve come out and denied these very serious allegations but I had to test the theory so my friend and I ordered a full cheese pizza to the office. The evidence was definitely suspicious but the pizza was honestly quite tasty. My food standards did drop to all-time lows when I lived in Salt Lake City but I remember this pizza bein objectively and surprisingly good (not surprising to locals who’d been to Chuck E. Cheese and were avid fans but surprising to me who has only seen the rat). It arrived hot and had an excellent cheese to sauce ratio. However, it does look like it was cut by the same kind of person that also doesn’t know that there is one easy, logical and right way to cut a birthday cake into an even number of pieces.

Lately, I haven’t made pizza from scratch. I’ve been buying pre-made dough (Oh, the treason!) but I still make my own sauce (San Marzano tomatoes FTW) . I’ve settled on a mix between ricotta and mozzarella with fresh basil and Momofuku Chili Crunch as my top toppings on my perfect pizza. It never disappoints. I’m a creature of habit and love tradition. This is one of Adult Vish’s favorites.

I just bought a new pizza stone but she showed up broken. Looks like the perfect pizza needs no improvement.