Pizza is awesome. I figured I should get that out of the way from the beginning. If I had to hypothetically subsist on one food group for the rest of my life, I would pick pizza. Pizza is the quintessential culinary achievement, capturing centuries of baking genius into 16″ diameter circles of paradise. If I could marry pizza I would, even if I had to run away to Canada because they passed propositions against me.
So naturally one of the things that I have been looking forward to the most upon moving to Manhattan is New York pizza. New York pizza is probably the best pizza ever, which is quite a feat. It’s typically rather thin, greasy, slightly crispy, and comes in pieces so big you have to fold them in half to get them to fit in your mouth.
New York Pizza.
(Looks like someone took a bite out of this one. I wish it were me.)
This week, K got on a plane to Florida to visit her mom, and consequently I have had lots of spare time to eat pizza. With no woman in the vicinity to curb my ability to eat pizza for every consecutive meal, I have decided to take upon myself the noble task of rating every pizza joint in Manhattan, starting at my apartment and circling outward.
K left approximately 18 hours ago, and so far I have had pizza 4 times.
Due to the gratuitously high grease level of New York pizza, I have decided it would be unsafe to consume pizza more often than once every 4.5 hours. So, in order to maximize my safe pizza intake and the amount of pizza joints I can rate, I have been meticulously eating 1 (giant) slice per 4.5 hour period. And so far so good!
At this rate, I will devour 37 slices of pizza by the time K returns from her trip. I estimate that at this point my pizza radius will have reached about 12 blocks.
I am using a very strict set if criteria for my pizza rating system. In pizza taxonomy, there are several Phylums and Orders and Classes and stuff, so to make my experiment consistent I am eating only cheese pizza. Which is the best kind of New York pizza anyway. The common criteria for my study are the following: size of slice, cheese and sauce amounts, crust crispiness, overall taste, and PGR, which stands for Pizza Grease Runoff. The perfect pizza slice will have just the right amount of each of these, and ideally will cause my body to narrowly avoid going into a coma. Although if that does happen, it will be coma of happiness.
So it looks like I have an excellent week ahead of me. 4 down and 33 pizza joints to go. Maybe K will get delayed in Memphis and I can make it an even 34. And if that 34th slice does me in, well… I hope they serve pizza at my funeral. Until then, bon apetite to me!
