Pizza. Ask a thousand people where to find the best pizza in Jersey and you’ll get a thousand different answers.
Yesterday I took the family up to the place that gets my vote…..an out of the way place in Hackensack ironically named “Brooklyn’s Pizza”. Funny thing is that there’s really nothing unique about it, since you can find coal-fired brick oven pie just about anywhere….not just in Jersey or Brooklyn. However, I’d been going there since my buddy Eugene from Lodi first took me there in 1991, so they’d become a habit ever since.
Ironic too that just yesterday, while we were sitting there enjoying the pie, we were talking about the place that was the precursor to many of these brick oven joints you find all over. It happens that, unbeknown to us, the place we were talking about had burnt down in a fire just that morning. It was a landmark in Brooklyn….so much so that it’s demise made the 11 o’clock news on Channel 4. My wife and I looked at each other in shock. “Weren’t we just talking about Totonno’s today?”
How the fire got started God only knows….the place had to be over a hundred years old. But if you had ever been there, you’d remember it. Character. No frills. Get what you want, and get the hell out. “We close when the dough runs out”…..that’s the kind of place it was. As kids, my mom used to drive us down to Coney Island on a Friday to eat there. She grew up a block away from the place. The 3 of us used to cry, “…but ma, we don’t want to eat pizza in the slums!” Not that we lived in the lap of luxury, but why go there!
But just like a nationally known chain uses the slogan, “when you’re here, you’re family.”…this place lived it. My mom knew the woman who was the only waitress, and the guy behind the counter who made the pies. They were brother and sister who inherited the place from their father, who happened to come from the same town in Italy as my mother’s father.
The guy behind the counter always seemed like an eternal grouch. Ask him how long you’d have to wait for a pie, and he’d bite your head off. Better just to shut up and wait, and if the dough ran out while you were waiting….well, too bad! His sister was a pretty sweet woman, although like her brother, she never smiled much. But thousands of people knew the place…..knew that they were only open 3 days a week….knew that they had the same marble fixtures and the same ice box where the soda was stored that dated back to the year of the flood! Knew that the tomatoes were always the best, the mozzarella was always the freshest, and even if the brother just schmered on the ingredients, it didn’t matter. The pie was still the tastiest.
So it came as no surprise that when the piemaker died in '93 or '94, the Daily News ran a spread on him…..detailing the history of the place and all the accommodations they’d won in years past. It was so much of a legend that their niece and her husband, not wanting to see it fade into history, took the place over, and shocker to think this, even opened up a place like it on the Upper East Side!
Well yesterday, a little piece of history was taken out in a fire. Will Coney Island see one of its original landmarks again? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. But it does make you remember all those great places you may have been to in the past that had “character”. Jimmy Buff’s in Irvington, where the hot dogs are deep fried in oil, and buried inside a "pizza bread" with greasy home fris…..Agostino’s in Hoboken. I’ve never been, but I’m told the waitress there is a trip….if you can get a reservation...because they only have 5 tables! Pat’s in Philly…..know what the hell you want or get off the line.
When you’re there, you really are like family…verbal abuse and all! Too bad the slogan’s gone corporate.
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4 comments:
Sounds like the soup Nazi of pizza.
Sucks that real places like that go down while places like Little Caesars are still around.
You want good pizza Ray? Come to La Casa Bianca in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. It was voted best pizza in central Jersey by New Jersey Monthly in 2007.
Ray stay local, come to Toms River.leave your house come down along the beach. cross the 37 bridge to the washington st light.take this to downtown T.R. about 2 miles. at the end on the left is "Capones and Jimmy C's".
Frank and Maryann Capone and thier son Jimmy share a common entrance. Capones is Italian with a stone wood fire oven. the pie is to die for. or try my favorite Pasta Bolonaise. if the sauce over firm pasta is good the rest of the menu will be great. Jimmys place is more American food but you can order from either menu and they have a bar too so a "cocktail" or two is possible. booths, tables or at the bar whichever you like. My favorite place in town.
I moved to Orlando for two years and yes...moved back to NJ for a few reasons. Anyway, Florida has THE worst pizza. There was one that had the nerve to call themselves "Brooklyn Pizza."
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