Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Conical Pizza? Comical!

Love is not like a (pizza) pie; it knows no boundaries.


I'm starting to rethink that truism.

With the recent (recent as in this past week) opening of the pizza joint that serves pizza in cones, K! Pizzacone, I think I now know my boundaries. Occupying a space no larger than your average Tasti-D at 325 Fifth Ave near 32nd Street, people are clamoring to see what all the buzz is about. I'll tell you: you walk in and order a "pizza" and point to the toppings you want that are neatly arranged in plastic tins, just like the toppings stations at your favorite fro yo joint. Some people, myself included -- call us pizza traditionalists -- are all up in a tizzy about this place that's out to "prove" cones can function as more than a holder for ice cream and sprinkles. Apparently this comica-- err, conical pizza trend has already taken Italy and Brazil by storm, but -- and this is saying a lot from this Italiophile -- K! Pizzacone just doesn't cut it for me. Call me a naysayer to the progressive, to the new, to the expanding, but come on now?? Pizza? In a cone? And at $4.90 a cone? I just don't think so.

I imagine it to be an overly dough-y mess, with all the toppings concentrated on the top and in the center, and all the heavy dough surrounding it so you don't get an even distribution in one bite; rather, you get all the dough in one part of the bite and then all the topping in another part of the bite. Exactly how pizza should not be eaten. Pizza, like a good chopped salad, should find all the ingredients permeated all along and across the thin pizza slice, so you get all the ingredients, not too much of one but the same amount of all, in one bite.

I can appreciate the convenience of this conical invention: not having to fold your pizza, not having greasy pizza oil dripping on and subsequently staining your shirt; but that's really what it is to me: an invention. It should be relegated to a genre other than the pizza genre. The snack genre.

But what happened? Why are infamously picky foodie New Yorkers so into this blasphemous new trend? Is it just the Midtowners who are excited about it? (That would explain a lot; no offense) Did New Yorkers become so exhausted over the whole grade A, ovens-imported-from-Naples, D.O.C. Mozzarella-only pizza joints like Keste and Motorino that bombarded the dining sections of every New York-centric paper for months and caused full on pizza wars that they've resigned themselves to spherical dough?

Come on, guys. We can do better than this.

Be happy and Carpe Diem!

2 comments:

ST3 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ST3 said...

Yay for updates! This is Alyson's boyfriend, Stephen. I guess New Yorkers have had so much of "good pizza" they want to try something else. Philly is still trying to get "good pizza" down, but I think we have quite a few up and coming contenders.