Backslide...

Forgive me, for I am weak.

I really can't resist pizza. Especially when I get home hungry at 9:30. Yet I'm destroying my own suspense. I've said I'm on a crusade to get a real piece of pizza, but I'm just blowing smoke. Clearly I am willing to settle for convenience over artistry.

I could get in the car and drive to New Haven for some of the best pizza in the country, some say the world. I could hop a train to Manhattan and finally visit Una Pizza Napoletana. I could try one of several well-reputed places in Brooklyn, relatively easily. But these special trips seem to go against the casual inspiration of "let's have pizza."

See, I'm still justifying. I need to make a special trip, just to cure my jones. It must happen. "Let's have pizza" clearly isn't working out.

These, by the way, are Margherita slices from the only pizzeria in town that Margy and I hadn't tried until now, the one local place with a brick oven. The pizza looks pretty good, doesn't it? All I can say is this: having a brick oven means nothing unless you make a decent pie to cook in it. The fresh mozzarella was good. That's about as much praise as I can muster. The sauce was sweet enough to put over ice cream, and the crust had no flavor at all. It did, however, have plenty of texture: It was so dense at the end that a saw would have had trouble getting through it.

I swear, some places expect, I might even say encourage, people to throw away their end crusts. Disgraziato.