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Congratulations to Colin Hagendorf, who just succeeded at eating at every single pizza place in Manhattan -- and blogged about it, too! That's 362 pizza joints in 2 1/2 years -- which divides into .... (doing some math, oh never mind) not a pizza slice a day, thank goodness. But it's still a whole lotta pizza, you know what I'm sayin'?
Colin even came up with a rating system, from 1 (bad) to 8 (phenomenal). But the real feat was finding new ways to describe pizza. He actually came up with some creative comparisons -- like the Freddy Krueger, for pizza so burned, it's disfigured. Call me a time-waster, but I could easily spend the rest of the afternoon reading Colin's spit-take-hilarious pizza descriptions.
Colin's at his best when he's describing terrible pizza. I tried to include a few descriptions of good pizza in here, but it's the roasts that I love. You could say that a pizza joint that delivers terrible-tasting pizza deserves no dignity. But I'm going to protect these pizza places anyway and just post Colin's colorful descriptions with a link to the original post.
March 31, 2011 "...sauce was too red and tasted like cans, the cheese was like lumps of flavorless plasticy rubber." May 3, 2011 "This slice had good cheese, dare I say, great cheese. It tasted like actual dairy as opposed to dairy-ish substance." June 24, 2011 "...it had that grease taste that reminds you of bad butter." June 10, 2011 "It's like bubblegum." September 27, 2011 "As an exercise, walk to your rubbish heap, find a sullied sponge amongst the refuse, perhaps one with which you cleaned your toilet, and bite into it -- this roughly approximates the experience of eating a slice at so-called [name withheld]." May 5, 2011 "Greg said, 'it sort of reminds me of the surface of the moon.' And this slice is somewhat terrifying and alien. The taste of this slice is defined more by an absence of flavor than any defining characteristic. It tastes like a lack. This is that mysterious substance known as anti-pizza." December 2, 2010 "This slice was gratifying if slightly disappointing, like when you masturbate too often." February 19, 2010 "The slice here tasted like jarred salsa. Seriously. I kept thinking of those Pace Chunky Salsa commercials from my youth and a chorus of cowboys in my head shouted 'NEW YORK CITY?!?!' every time I took a bite." July 11, 2011 "The sauce taste was a little overwhelming, but I think in a more moderate quantity it could definitely be a more subtle component in the complex flavor of a good slice, as opposed to the edible equivalent your hamfisted, slightly drunk uncle who is nice when he's sober, but who, after his fifth beer, talks too loud about uncomfortable subjects on Thanksgiving." Last but not least, from Heights Pizza:I took the first bite and it was as near perfect as it could be short of it's only existing as the waking recollections of a fleeting pizza dream. The dough, made and cooked perfectly, was probably a centimeter thick throughout the slice and maybe 1.5-2 cm at the crust. The very bottom was a layer of perfectly crisp perfection, segueing into a beautifully soft sponge of dough. The sauce was adequately sweet, but still retained a fair amount of the natural tartness and tang of the tomatoes. And the cheese was solid and congealed enough to properly contain the moist interior of the slice, but it was still warm and gooey enough to slide apart in my mouth with every bite. Slices like this make all the mediocre and bad pizza I have and am bound to continue eating worth it. This is an A+ slice.
You're Google-mapping Heights Pizza now for that trip you'll someday take to New York now, aren't you?
Can you imagine eating this much pizza?
Image via The Pizza Review/Flickr
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