columns2 | NYB

Welcome to Eat This! Your insider's guide to the best food New York City has to offer. And that doesn't mean sending you to posh and trendy restaurants - you can read about those anywhere. Still, if that’s how you want to blow your dough, knock yourself out...

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You knew I’d have to get on the vaunted subject of pizza, didn’t you? We all have our favorites, we dyed-in-the-wool Noo Yawkas, and we stick with them like glue. But I am a person who can stand a bit of correction now and then, particularly when I can’t pretend to have tried every bloody pizza out there. Oh, I have my favorites, all right, and I’ll tell you all about them. But I’ll start today’s lecture with a loving ode to the best pizza in New York.

The Best
Di Fara’s. Say it with me: Di Fara’s! Avenue J and East. 15th Street, Midwood, Brooklyn. Go there. NOW! Don’t stop anywhere along the way. Pass on the chains and their stuffed-crusts and meat-piles. Say no to any pie with a theme assigned to it. Keep walking if they promise you it’ll be ready in 10 minutes. Any pie worth its salt is worth a wait. If speed is your criteria for ordering, do yourself a favor and pick another food group. Real, life-altering pizza actually takes some time to put together, and is made with real ingredients, like bufala mozzarella.

And if any of these other joints vying for your attention made their pizzas with anything like bufala mozzarella, they wouldn’t need to stuff the crusts or pile on pounds of meat or any of the other chaff that lesser cooks use as smoke and mirrors to hide shoddy ingredients and mediocre preparation.

Di Fara’s, in a lot of ways, defies normal description. It would be like trying to explain the difference between a Thomas Kinkade printed mug and the work of any real artist – the chasm between the two are so great as to be nearly impossible to grasp.

Dominic DeMarco is a man who cares - really cares, about what he’s created every day for 40 years and counting.

The cheeses are grated immediately before going on the pie. I watched as he snipped the fresh basil on to the steaming pizza, hot from the 700-degree Fahrenheit oven. When you care that deeply about something you do, no matter how prosaic, you can elevate that thing into an art. But Di Fara’s pizzas are not prosaic. They are magic - delicate, mouthwatering, and tasting of ingredients of extraordinary quality, like the extra virgin olive oil he pours on the porcini mushroom slice I had to order. And this absolute dedication to creating the best pizza possible has won him adulation and accolades and lines that gather before he even opens his doors at lunchtime.

A warning: waits of one or two hours are not uncommon. Each pie is lovingly made by the master himself - one at a time. He doesn’t grandstand and he never rushes. And when you bite into this best of all possible slices, you will forget all about the wait. I promise.

Are there any other worthwhile pizzerias in New York City? Yes, indeed there are. I’ll report on those in future columns. If you have particular favorites you want me to review, please email me. Until next time……

The work of a genius.

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