Best Food Writing 2014 (44 page)

“Some of the things we revere, the deeper we dig, we find compromise. In origin and intention,” Bianco said. “But sometimes we can create things where the deeper you dig, the better it gets.”

Then there's the antique Coke sign Bianco plans to mount in the restaurant. Bianco is all about the local, the individual—about the singularly produced. But he likes the Coke sign. Yes, Pizzeria Bianco will be serving glass-bottle Mexican Coke. But mostly, the sign belongs in the space because Bianco loves its worn surface. The patina. “We say words like ‘patina' or ‘time-worn,'” he said. “But all that means is journey. All these objects have gone on a journey. They show their scars. Maybe it's just me getting old, but I like things that show their scars. Especially as a chef,” and he looked at his forearms, where every chef worth his salt bears burns. “The scars are what matter . . . You learned because you didn't listen.”

In the middle of the room: A big concrete box, made of bricks, elevated off the ground. “And that? . . .” I said; “That's the epicenter,” he replied. He walked over to the newly installed wood-burning pizza oven. He looked at it. He started to say something, then stopped. He fingered a weird corner of the metal—then walked away.

He looked back at it and said, as if in a comic book, a dramatically sparse statement for a man so loquacious: “The fire.”

So, is the pizza really that good?
is the question you're asked when writing about “the best pizza in America.” Hidden implication: Come on, it can't be that good.

We all, generally, like pizza. So what could the “best pizza” even be like? The phrase carries with it an absurd level of expectation.
One expects, at the very least, that one's jaw will be literally blown from one's cranium, since one's taste buds have just exploded.

But when I ate the pizza, it was simply delicious. The first time I tried it, I was on vacation in Phoenix. It was one great part of one great night. The pizza was great. I loved it. But it was just part of the night.

“I hope you're never here to judge,” Bianco said, “just to enjoy.” He wants the full experience to be enjoyable at Pizzeria Bianco. “Food itself never mattered to me. It's all the stuff that goes into it, everything—and everyone—around it. I want you to have an experience.”

Bianco's menu in Phoenix—“It'll be the same thing in Tucson, with maybe a funky local thing or two”—is just one page: one starter; a salad or two; and then six pizzas, all of them pretty simple.

For Bianco, it all starts with his sourcing, and he's been advocating for local ingredients before the portmanteau “locavore” was ever portmanteauxed. “The biggest thing I had to learn,” he said, “growing up when I did? Not everything that tastes good is good for you.” That seems obvious to us now, but way back whenever Bianco wanted to create something that was both. Bianco wants his food to be good for you, but “that said, none of that fucking matters if the food doesn't taste fucking delicious.” He adds: “Health food stores would have sold a lot more if they didn't call themselves ‘Health Food Store'—instead just called themselves ‘Good Restaurant.'

“All that said, I hope if someone walks in here and doesn't know shit about shit, just wants pizza . . . he gets it. He eats it and thinks, fuck . . . and it makes him dig deeper.” Fuck, yes.

Almost 30 years ago, right before opening the first Pizzeria Bianco, Bianco was in New York and spied a very old Italian restaurant that was going out of business.

“I was looking for stuff for my bar, so I poked my head in,” he said. He tracked down the remaining owner—a widow who was eager to retire. “I had to tell her, ‘No, no, no, I'm not crazy, I'm just starting a restaurant. I want to know if you're selling anything.'”

“I have one thing,” she said, “but it's too expensive.” When he asked to see it anyway, she took him into her garage and revealed a beautiful old oak bar. The bar had upheld the elbows of her restaurant patrons since the 1920s—but it was older than that: The widow and
her husband had originally purchased it from a New York grocery that had been in business since the 1880s. “It had marks from cigars,” Bianco said, from “guys back then.”

Bianco rested his palm very briefly on the bar where he sat while telling me this story, in the original Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, and I realized we were sitting at the widow's bar. The cigar stain near my own elbow was 150 years old.

“She took pity on me,” he said, and sold it to him at the only price he could pay. But I'm not sure it was pity. I think it was that he valued her bar about as much as he valued her (and she could tell this); which is to say, he valued her and her bar very, very highly. She parted with these remnants of her bar, saying, “I hope it brings you good luck.”

Bianco loves things—but in the most nonmaterialistic way. Bianco loves things, objects, but loves them merely as tangible representations of moments, people—tangible totems of moments spent with people. Indeed, Bianco loves things that he senses were created by people. People he likes. I think this is what he means when he repeatedly uses the word “authentic.”

What it takes to create a restaurant is more than buying equipment and serving food. Of greater importance are the people that contribute, said Bianco. The restaurant is built on relationships.

And this is why Chris Bianco could never create a “chain”—at least not in the modern, American sense. He cares far too much about people. About things. About things as representations of all the people he loves. Each an individual.

A man, a plan, a pizza.

Personal Tastes

W
hat a cad I used to be, constantly ditching the bistro that had opened only four months ago for the week-old trattoria with an even dewier complexion, callously trading in the yellowtail sashimi that had been so good to me for a hot tamale of unproven charms.

Then, a few years back, the restaurant Barbuto and I settled down.

It's bliss. She knows my heart, knows my drill: a gin martini to begin, a seasonal salad for my appetizer, the roasted chicken after.

And I know her. If the weather's nice, a breeze will blow in from the West Village streets that her retractable walls open onto. The kale that she serves me will be sparingly dressed. And the breast meat? As plump and tender as it was the last time around and the dozen times before that.

We don't have fireworks, not this late in the game. But we have a rhythm. Sometimes that's better.

What I'm saying is that I'm a regular there, as I am at the Breslin, whose lamb burger is as true to me as I am to it; at Empellón Taqueria, where I never stray from the fish tempura tacos, which never let me down; at Szechuan Gourmet, where I don't glance at a menu. I don't have to.

I'm no monogamist, that's clear. More of a polygamist, but I dote on my sister wives. I've come to see that the broccolini isn't always greener on the other side of Houston Street, and I'm here to sing what's too seldom sung: the joys of familiarity. The pleasures of intimacy. The virtues of staying put.

What you have with a restaurant that you visit once or twice is a transaction. What you have with a restaurant that you visit over and over is a relationship.

The fashionable script for today's food maven doesn't encourage that sort of bonding, especially not in a city with New York's ambition and inexhaustible variety. Here you're supposed to dash to the new Andrew Carmellini brasserie before anybody else gets there; be the first to taste ABC Cocina's guacamole; advertise an opinion about the Massaman curry at Uncle Boons while others are still puzzling over the fugitive apostrophe. Snap a photo. Tweet it. Then move on. There's always something else. Always virgin ground.

For years, I was dedicated to exploring it, by dint of my duty as
The Times
's restaurant critic. I was a paid philanderer. It was exhilarating. It was exhausting.

And it wasn't necessarily the best course. I'd think back to my precritic days, in Rome, and to the handful of restaurants I kept circling around to. The servers and owners there would exult when I walked through the door, because they understood how to make me happy and they could have a conversation with me different from the ones they had with newcomers, a conversation built on shared history and reciprocal trust, a dialogue between honest-to-goodness friends. I wasn't special. But I was special to them.

I'd think, too, of my food-loving father's approach to dining out. When he found a place with a few dishes and a few servers he adored, and when those servers reciprocated his affection, he stopped looking around. Called off the search. He understood what I've relearned these last few years, with Barbuto and the others: the smiles you get from hosts, hostesses and bartenders who know you are entirely
unlike the smiles from ones who are just meeting you. They're less theatrical, less stilted, warmer by countless degrees.

Regulars matter to a restaurant. Though the newcomers drawn there by reviews or Yelp chatter can keep it packed for a while, the familiar faces help it go the distance. That's why some of those fusty, pricey Italian haunts on the Upper East Side outlast the trend-conscious efforts of this “Top Chef” alumnus or that darling of the culinary scribes. They've put extra energy into cultivating a steady clientele, turning themselves into clubs, into tribes.

“It's the only way to do it,” said Robert Bohr, one of the owners of the new restaurant Charlie Bird, in SoHo, which is designed, as are Barbuto and so many other restaurants in that general area of downtown Manhattan, to be a repeat refuge for neighborhood folks who like to drop in impulsively. A few tables are informally tagged for such “walk-ins,” as they're called in the business, and the menu accommodates snacking as well as feasting.

Mr. Bohr said that he had worked at what he called “destination restaurants,” and that while first- and second-timers might keep them humming at peak hours during peak stretches, “it's regulars who support you on off days, in bad weather, during times of the night that aren't prime times.”

In return, regulars at most restaurants get extra consideration: a glass of sparkling wine that wasn't asked for, a dessert that just appears, a promotion to the head of the waiting list when the place is full. There's a practical, unemotional reason to join the frequent-flier club. Perks accrue.

Mr. Bohr noted that you can make requests of a restaurant where you're a regular that you'd never make—and that might not be indulged—elsewhere. Because he has lunch as often as once a week at ABC Kitchen, he can place his order the second he sits down and say, “I want to be out in 25 minutes.”

“They're welcoming to that,” he said, because he's been loyal and he'll be back.

And that's why Charlie Bird doesn't flinch when Stephen Carlin, an investment banker, pops in unannounced at 6 p.m. with his wife and their two children, both under 4 years old. Just three and a half months into its existence, he has already been there some 15 times, he told me.

“They make me feel like family,” he said.

Regulars make a restaurant feel a certain way, too.

“It has such a huge impact on the morale of the staff, to see people falling in love with what you're doing,” said Eamon Rockey, the general manager of the new restaurant Betony, in Midtown Manhattan.

The diner who comes back again and again is a validation, a vindication. “It changes the culture of a restaurant,” Mr. Rockey said, explaining that managers and servers become intent not on razzle-dazzle but on reading diners' minds, anticipating their needs, soothing them.

That's precisely what I value. I'm not a regular at the Breslin, in Midtown, for one of the curtained booths that I'm usually ushered to, the prime real estate that devoted patrons often get. I'm not a regular at Perla, an Italian favorite of mine in Greenwich Village, for the free appetizer sometimes put on the table.