I had planned to leave Valhalla on Monday morning, but during Sunday evening's meandering discussion of things New York, which mostly centered on food, a gross oversight became manifest: we had not had any New York Style pizza during my visit. In order to rectify this, I had to stay an additional day. A sacrifice I was willing to make, as the cause was righteous.
We started off with breakfast at Tommy's, a delicatessen and cafe on Broadway in North White Plains. The breakfast menu was limited, and to be honest I wouldn't go back to this place; the coffee was the best we've had, but the food wasn't by any stretch of imagination. I had a bacon, egg and cheese on a roll because the cheerful and outgoing owner recommended it, but the sandwich was a disappointment. It was cold and not very filling, and the roll was flavourless and lacking in texture. It was like packaged dinner rolls.
From the reviews posted on line, it's really more of a lunch place, and we actually only went there because the place we had come looking for, the City Line Deli (not to be confused with the City Limits Deli, where we went a day or two before), has disappeared from the building across the street. Tommy's shop is very small, with only three or four tables inside; we snagged one outside, as the weather was nice, and we got to watch the cement trucks going back and forth on the road, and some guy with a shovel grumpily scraping up the gravel that they drop in the travel lanes. (There's a cement plant just down a side-street; we passed it on the way to the restaurant.) It was also entertaining, watching people try (or not try) to park without blocking the crosswalk, and trying to extricate their cars from the curb when a delivery vehicle double-parked and blocked them in. This is apparently an accepted hazard in the metropolitan area, as no one was the least bit upset about it.
Steve had some errands to run with Dorothy, which left me on my own. (That was when I went out to the Dam Plaza and wrote Part Six of this blog post series, which you should have already read. These posts make so much more sense when you read them in order.) When they came back they brought pastries from an upscale bakery in Connecticut. Steve assures me that "upscale" is not redundant when used to describe any old thing in Connecticut, but I have my doubts. We sampled a chocolate scone, a white chocolate scone, a sort of Danish pastry, and a streusel-looking cake thing. All were good. We talked for a while and then it was time to take Dorothy home. She lives in Port Chester, in a co-operative apartment building, which I don't really understand. It seems to be like a condo, but with a surfeit of rules.
So we dropped her off and then drove north to Chappaqua and some other towns up that way; I forget why. Again, we missed seeing Bill and Hillary, but I can't say I'm surprised. They probably don't get out much, and we don't actually know where in Chappaqua their house is.
At some point we started trying to narrow down our choices for pizza. It was essential that we find a place with excellent New York style pizza, but first we had to have the discussion of what the hell constitutes New York style pizza. I'm of the opinion that there are only three "styles" of pizza in the United States: New York style, with thin crust; Chicago style (or pan pizza), with a sturdy crust capable of supporting vast quantities of toppings; and Sicilian, with a sort of thick cake-like crust.* There are all kinds of variations of toppings, including of course Hawaiian, the very idea of which is heathen sacrilege to New Yorkers, though I like it. Steve is of the opinion that there are lots and lots of pizza styles, and he thinks that New York style is not the same as thin crust because somewhere they sell pizzas on crusts as thin as crackers, and because once upon a time a pizza maker told him he couldn't sell him a pizza with more than two ingredients because it wouldn't support the weight.
I, of course, am right, but Steve wouldn't accept that and found all kinds of web sites listing twelve or twenty or sixty-two styles of pizza; but they weren't "styles" of pizza. They were variations on the three styles, some of which -- like "Colorado style" -- are sold in only one shop in some remote provincial town like St. Louis or a suburb of Denver. Just because a shop owner in South Philadelphia makes a pie with some odd combination of toppings, he hasn't created a new style of pizza. Just because some guy in Detroit decides to put the tomato sauce on top of the cheese doesn't mean his creation is anything but a Sicilian pizza with the sauce on top. Just because a bunch of bar cooks use a mix of cheddar and mozzarella cheese doesn't make "bar style" pizza a real thing. Putting clams on a pizza doesn't make New Haven pizza a style: it's still just a New York style pizza with clams, popular in New Haven.
Steve and I somehow ended up at Colony Grill, a local chain of Irish sports bars with a location back in Port Chester, by the marina. I don't know how that became our pizzeria of choice. It appeared on several people's lists of the best places, but come on. An Irish bar? For pizza? And we passed easily more than half a dozen other, more likely venues, places with Italian names. But there we were.
They offered pizza in one size and with one type of crust, the thin crust that I consider the defining feature of New York style. They offer the traditional toppings and a few that I suspect are there just for the determinedly contrary sort of trend-driven postmodern consumer. I'll only say two words about it, and then move on: salad pizza.
Steve had no preference as to toppings. I was tempted to choose just pepperoni, as that is an archetypical New York pizza topping. But I decided it would be better to go with the same toppings I almost always get on my pizzas back home, in order to have a more valid point of comparison. So I asked for sausage, mushroom and black olive.
It wasn't a bad pizza. The restaurant's signature feature seems to be something called "hot oil"; I'm not sure if it's supposed to be hot-spicy or hot-heated; it was neither. It's listed as a topping option, but we didn't ask for it, yet the pizza we got was oily in the extreme. You have to eat it over something you don't mind dripping on, like the table or a paper plate, which they provide. The sausage was plentiful; the mushrooms seemed a little scant; and the black olives were as abundant as rules at a co-operative apartment building.
The pizza has good fold. This, I believe, is an essential criterion for true New York style pizza. You have to be able to fold it in half so you can eat it while walking down a crowded sidewalk. Of course, the oil dripping from the crease kind of militates against actually doing that with this pizza, but structurally the Colony Grill pizza meets the requirement. It's a success, too, in terms of crunch, another vital characteristic of New York style pizza. The pie we had definitely is one of the crunchiest I've ever had, and no matter where I go in the world (with two exceptions: Chicago and Austin), New York Style is my preference these days. But none has had the crunch of this pizza. So mark that down as a Yes.
The last discernible criterion is undercarriage. This has to do with the structural integrity of the crust. Does the narrow tip of the slice droop under the weight of the ingredients? Is it soggy, or has it cooked evenly in the oven? Is the thickness uniform from tip to rim? This one was successful, on all points. So I guess you'd have to say this was a high-quality New York style pizza. The only aspect of it that I wasn't completely happy with was all that damn oil dripping all over the place.
So anyway: the pizza-related oversight was rectified, and we celebrated by stopping off at the Village Creamery in Valhalla for an ice cream cone. They make their own there, and it's worth every penny of the prices, which are comparable to any premium shops where they don't make the ice cream in-house. I had a scoop of chocolate chunk salted caramel and I think it showed massive self-control that I only had one scoop. I would go out on a limb and say it's the best ice cream in the United States, but the truth is it's only the most recent home-made ice cream I've had. Places like Baskin Robbins and Amy's and Stone Cold Creamery and, yes, even Ben & Jerry's are good -- very good -- but places that make their own, like the Village Creamery, are in the Honors Class of ice cream shops. (Shout out to Justin's Ice Cream, back home!)
Afterwards we developed a plan for Tuesday. I wasn't in any great hurry to get on the road. My original plan had been thwarted by the fact that the car museum I'd planned to go to in Allentown switched its schedule at the beginning of September and is now closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. So instead of going there and then up to Corning for the glass museum, I'd go directly to Corning. The change also meant that I'd be able to put Lititz, Pennsylvania, back into the mix. I'd planned to visit with John, a friend who lives there, on the way up, but he was away from home when I went through; and when I'd looked at rearranging my return trip with the Allentown stop intact, it wouldn't work to go to see him. Now, though, it's a modest enough variance of route and it won't put the next stop, in Huntingdon, out of the realm of possibility. I'll be able to meet John and still get to Huntingdon in good time to go to that museum.
I'm not sure why, but these people in the Northeast seem unduly curious about what route I'm taking. Both Steve and John focused on the point: Steve on what route I would take to get to Corning, as if I knew, and John on which way I was coming from Corning to Lititz. They want to speculate on which is the best route. And neither seems to accept, deep down, that I'm not wedded to taking the fastest or most efficient route. At some point on return-trips I tend to get on a freeway and just go home, but until that moment arrives -- usually a moment of pique or frustration, or after learning of bad weather a-comin' -- I'm more likely to be found on some two-lane back road than on the freeway running in the same direction a few miles away. That's the whole point of my wandering. And I have Google Maps, and now that I've deleted and re-loaded it, it works well enough, so I don't particularly want or need speculative advice about which route to take, especially since, not having studied paper maps in great detail, I have nothing to offer in such a discussion. (Sometimes I do study maps before setting out, and in those instances, advice from well-meaning but relatively amateurish locals is not welcome. I know what I'm looking for in route planning, and it's something that departs greatly from the norm.)
Thus, before I left Valhalla, I went to breakfast with Steve at a place called the Thornwood Coach Diner, on Kensico Road. It was great: easily the best breakfast we've had. The service was outstanding; the prices were reasonable; the atmosphere was comfortable and traditional. The menu was extensive, as most of these places' menus seem to be (Tommy's being the notable exception), and the food was very good. I had a Florentine omelet (feta and spinach) with bacon added, home fries and a bagel in lieu of toast, and it was all very well done. The bagel was dripping with butter, which was delicious. And the coffee was top-notch, and it kept coming. Definitely a five-star place.
Then I hit the road. The trip up to Corning was uneventful, even dull, despite the construction along the way. I was at the Museum of Glass by two in the afternoon, and decided I'd rather spend the time available there instead of using any part of it for lunch. I can afford to skip a meal. So I spent three hours, until closing time, looking at the exhibits. I don't know if the museum is way bigger than it was when I was there years ago, or if I just missed ninety percent of the displays. (I suspect the former; the building I thought was the museum is now a Welcome Center.) All the exhibits are on the spacious second floor. Large rooms are devoted to this history of glass around the world -- Africa, China, Japan, India -- but the bulk of the exhibits focus on European and American glass, because that's where most of it is done.
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| garish, klutzy and pretentious |
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| Nocturne 5 |
By the time the museum closed I was as hungry as I've been in a long time, so I consulted Google Maps and found a Chinese restaurant not far away. When I pulled up, my instincts said I should go somewhere else, but I was hungry enough that I followed through, and got perhaps the worst pork fried rice I've ever had. At least it was filling, and I shall never have to go back there again. While I was there I made a reservation at a hotel for the night, and went there to write up this post. I also watched the last half hour of the US v New Zealand men's soccer match, an unimpressive draw, and a little bit of the presidential candidates' debate, an even less impressive performance.
*I would be willing to accept napolitano as a style, with the not-so-thin irregular crust such as one gets at Dough Pizzeria in San Antonio, one of the few restaurants in the United States that makes pizza by hand in the style of Naples; but there really aren't enough such places to make it matter whether napolitano is a style or not.
