We have forgotten ourselves. To the rest of the country, New York City is Pizzatown, USA. Tourists come just to eat awful $3 slices from Ray’s, Famous Ray’s, Original Ray’s, Famous Original Ray’s and It Doesn’t Really Matter They All Suck Ray’s. But we locals aren’t doing much better.
A few celebrity chefs push SYSCO fries and Key Food ground chuck at us, tarted up “California style,” and suddenly New Yorkers, still smarting from the cupcake battles, are hostage to the burger wars, with new “concepts” sprouting up quicker than Portobello mushroom vegetarian burgers.
I want my food like my foreign policy, with as little conflict as necessary. But if one more Stockholm-syndromed beef addict tells me to try BLT, I might have to turn them into ground chuck. Sure, it takes skill to make a good burger, but even my drunk relatives can turn them out at the family barbecue, and the black sheep in your family probably can, too. What’s doubtful is whether Uncle Blotto could ever make a pizza like Michael Ayoub.
Having earned his plaudits at Fornino in Williamsburg, Ayoub has opened Cronkite, whose decor feels like the basement room at The Magician—just around the corner—if it had one. Cronkite is subterranean, with just a neon sidewalk sign to indicate that the oven is hot.
Pies of manifold configurations emerge from it, but they all have the same perfect crust in common. It’s thin enough to pleasantly crackle with each bite but sturdy enough to stand up to daring toppings like those of the aromatic Gamberi E Pesto ($15/$23), which packs a mortar’s worth of pesto underneath zucchini, rock shrimp and Parmesan.
Even the Funghi E Prosciutto ($13/$21), slathered with precious cured ham and delicate shiitake mushrooms, is handled with ease. I’ve never seen a thin crust Neapolitan style pizza stand up so effortlessly to anything the kitchen smothers it with before baking.
The crowds descend not just for those mad-genius pizzas, but also for the Vongole ($13/$21), served with a seafood fork to pick meats from the wide-open clams, and the Pugliese ($12/$20), made with fennel sausage and broccoli rabe. The Margherita DOC, (made with tomatoes certified to be bellissimo!) is, with its sweet sauce and delicate fresh cheese, the Platonic ideal of the form.
To complement the pizza and perhaps tie into the French Tintin en Amérique posters is a lengthy wine-list by pizza place standards, even gourmet pizza laboratory standards. But what on the menu is going to stand up to the 1996 Cantolupo Ghemme ($87)—a huge Nebbiolo that is one of the best wines to ever come out of Piedmont? I’m not sure even the Tartufo ($36/51), which means truffle, as in the ice-cream dessert but also sniffed out by pigs in the forest, could hold its own, but maybe some rich young investment bankers will write in and let me know, as I didn’t try either one.
Our bucks were better spent on appetizers, including the Buffalo Mozzarella Salad ($10), cunningly served with sliced grape tomatoes, seemingly always ripe in these otherwise fallow tomato months. I found the Roasted Eggplant’s ($8) sweet tomato sauce, baked with two cheeses, was watery, even though the taste was bene. My fungivorous friends went weak for the Polenta mushroom plate ($10), which was teeming with the most insanely pungent ’shrooms I’ve ever tasted, psychedelic or not. They were almost too much for me, but I’m just a mushroom fan—not a cultist.
More wine knowledge from the otherwise competent servers would help convince me that fine wines go with gourmet ’za. Regardless, Cronkite is serving an inventive and sometimes thrilling cuisine that is way, way outside of the bun. So forget it, Jake. It’s Pizzatown.
Cronkite Pizzeria & Wine Bar
133 Norfolk St. (at Rivington St.)
212-375-1500
