PrintPizza Needs Heart and Soul
There are a few ingredients every great pizza needs, and I don't mean cheese, sauce and dough. Last night I went to Pala, a new Roman-style pizzeria just south of Houston Street at the northern tip of the Lower East Side. I was a few minutes early so I chatted with an Italian gentleman who I deduced to be the owner. He told me that he uses a brick-lined electric oven that can get up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit, a combination of Italian fresh mozzarella and a good local cow's milk mozzarella purveyor, DiPalo Dairy, high-quality LaValle (sp?) canned tomatoes, and twelve kinds of flour in his dough, including King Arthur and Giusti, a California-based organic flour purveyor. So why was his pizza so bland and flat-tasting? Well, first and foremost because it lacked salt. And beyond that, it was missing the most important ingredients of all, heart, soul and love. Either nobody in the joint either knew what great pizza tastes like, or nobody cared enough to do what it takes to make great pizza. Pala coulda been a contender. At this point it's clearly a wannabe.
0 Comments - Add a comment:
Previewing your comment:
HTML Hints
Some HTML is OK: <a href="URL">link</a>, <strong>strong</strong>, <em>em</em>
Comment Guidelines
Post whatever you want, just keep it seriously about eats, seriously. We reserve the right to delete off-topic or inflammatory comments. Learn more at our Comment Policy page.
If you see something not so nice, please, report an inappropriate comment.
