Eating pizza is something we all do a lot of. We’ve been doing it since we were kids, unless we are lactose intolerant or were raised vegan, in which case we’ve wrung some pleasure out of bread with tomato sauce on it and called it pizza.
It’s a significant part of a city’s life, too. In the suburbs, your pizza options are limited to chains. Those who cannot live in one-Pizza Pizza towns move to the city and let their freak flags fly. If I were Richard Florida, I’d argue that you can judge a city by its pizza industry. Bigger cities tend to have an abundance of late-night pizza options and a robust sit-down pizza sector. That really means nothing except that bigger cities tend to have more things to do at night, as well as citizens who can afford luxury pies, but I’ll take it further and claim that each city has its own pizza culture.
To learn more about how pizza culture works, I contacted a pizza critic from New York and a pizza critic from Montreal. Together, we talked about how we eat our pizza.
Charles Reinhardt, 25, was born in Toronto, but now he lives in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighbourhood. The adjustment was difficult. He was used to eating Toronto slices, which, he explains, are larger and have chewier cheese. New York slices are also “a bit floppier,” which makes them difficult to eat in public. This is why, in New York City, you fold your pizza in half.
“I actually didn’t know what to do with my wayward pizza slices until someone on the subway instructed me,” he says. “I was eating a very melty and floppy slice of pizza that was kind of roaming all over my plate. I didn’t know what part of the pizza to attack to prevent spillage. Then a young man called out from the seat across from me and instructed me to fold it in half. I wish I could say he did the stereotypical exasperated New Yorker thing, but he was very nice.”
For Amelia Schonbek, also 25 and a resident of Mile End in Montreal, pizza is less of a public affair and more of a comfy, order-in kind of thing. That’s because much of the pizza available in the streets of Montreal is “truly awful,” she says, “generally characterized by the proliferation of 99-cent slice shops that all churn out dry, cardboard-like specimens.” We Torontonians pay upward of $4 for our street ‘za (or “strizza”), but we shouldn’t envy our neighbours in the fairer city. “The worst part is that they’re rarely 99 cents now,” Amelia continues. “There’s a big flashing neon sign that says 99 cents, and then you go in and they charge you two bucks for anything other than cheese.”
(“The cheap-ass New York slices are not dry and cardboard-like. They are just more likely to give you indigestion,” notes Charles; the 99-cent pizza stores have taken Manhattan, too. “They are still tasty, which is why the uninitiated so frequently commit the error of having too many cheap-ass slices. They pay the price usually around two hours later.”)
Not that there’s much else to choose from. For all their worldliness, Montrealers are real prudes when it comes to toppings. Even pepperoni is not quite pepperoni but “a much larger, thicker thing that’s substituted,” and it is tucked modestly under the cheese rather than placed over top, as the word “topping” would suggest.
This is in stark contrast to New York, where you can find “things like caesar salad pizza, Buffalo wing pizza, and pasta pizza (a common one),” Charles says. “You see pizza with giant pieces of rigatoni and pasta sauce on it everywhere.” Other things you can order in New York are burritos wrapped in quesadillas and chickens stuffed with butter chicken.
Charles has never tried pasta pizza or caesar salad pizza. His favourite pie is “gourmet style with cheese and mushrooms.” Amelia likes mushrooms too, although she “definitely has stretches of ordering cheese.” Personally, I prefer cheese. I also like caprese, but caprese is just pizza with tomato and cheese, which makes it pizza pizza. Speaking of Pizza Pizza, that’s what we all grew up on. And, despite the finer options available to us, we all sometimes go back.
When I was a kid, my dad would take me to Pizza Pizza for a walk-in special every Friday. When I misbehaved, I “lost a pizza,” which sucked. Back then, the only strizza game in town was Amato, which rested on its laurels while Massimo’s went and built a second location. The only sit-down option was Il Fornello. Now there’s Terroni, Libretto, and Queen Margherita, which are all well and good, but I believe pizza is best enjoyed cross-legged on the floor. Also, using utensils to eat a pizza is like using tweezers to turn the pages of a book.
This is something that Charles, Amelia, and I can all agree on. Although our cities eat pizza in different ways, we all do it for the same reasons: it tastes good and makes everything feel like fun, even things like helping someone move or working late in the office. Just ordering pizza is fun, as Amelia points out. No matter the kind, pizza has magical properties that allow us to socialize better and feel like we’re having a good time. Which makes it a lot like cocaine, except different in every other way.
Not gourmet sit-down pizza, though. Once you put pizza on a plate and serve it with a knife and fork, it becomes something other than pizza. It becomes, in Charles’s words, “Italian food.”
