The Canonical Penguin – Food, Glorious Food…

…or more specifically, PIZZA. As anyone who has lived in NYC and then other places (or lived in other places and moves to NYC) knows, NYC has the best pizza in the world, hands down, no argument allowed or considered. Famous Chef Mario Batali has said it is the water that makes the pizza what it is. People from Chicago will argue, throwing out the whole deep dish pizza idea and there might be a bit of wiggle room there with the explanation that pizza is a thin crust product. Deep Dish Pizza, so many inches tall is a different animal and very, very delicious. I might even say that Chicago is THE place for the Deep Dish but as previously stated NYC has the BEST thin crust pie.

It has been said there is a bar on every corner in NYC and if that is true, then there are pizza joints on each side of it. What this really means is that every neighborhood, every hamlet, has a pizza place you swear by. You are a faithful customer, only getting your fix there unless circumstances don’t allow for that, at which point it is necessary to compare the slice in hand to your place’s slice and shake your head side to side, while affirming that “it’s not as good as the pizza at_____!” So now this leads me into a sad story about my pizza place.

VIPizza has been around for a long time, in its current location in Bayside, NY as it has been since I was a pre-teen some years ago. Ok, lets say 45 years at least. That is where we got our slices, that is only where we did even if there were at least 3 other places relatively the same distance from our house. When we got into our gambling binge where we played penny poker every Friday and Saturday night, a VIPizza was not far away. My friend Tommy even perfected the ritual of wiping pizza grease on the box as a good luck charm when he was doing poorly. Plain, Sicilian, pepperoni or not, doesn’t matter. It was the best. When we moved to Massachusetts, we recognized that loss whenever we got pizza or at least what the denizens of MA call that thing we get. When we had children, we would make sure to expose them to the glories of VIPizza whenever we visited. CollegeBoy became a disciple. Unfortunately, we messed up with MillieJupiter who does not like pizza at all although she has said she could handle a slice from VIPizza which is more than she has ever done before.

But now, the bad news. In the last couple of years, VIPizza was sold. Horrors! They new owners, although they make a good pie, cannot match the VIPizza tradition. I knew there were problems when relatives who still live down there told us they got their pizza from a different place now.

Horrors!

When we visited New Mexico in our retirement search tour, our friends took us to a place that had real brick oven pizza and it was excellent. The only problem is that it was not NY pizza. They tell us however that they opened a NY style pizza place near the NMSU campus. We drove by there during the visit but it had not opened yet. It opened up soon after that and The Zees report that it is an excellent pie! Hopefully it will be able to take the place of the childhood favorite but no longer attainable VIPizza. I’ll let you know.

(These are stories about things that actually happened with plenty of witnesses. It has passed from the apocryphal to canonical in nature. Wiki says of canon – “material that is considered to be "genuine", "something that actually happened", or can be directly referenced as material produced by the original author or creator.”)