Sal was a proud man, for sure, but he wasn’t an idiot. If a master baker wanted to help him tweak the dough, so be it. He and Tony went into the back, and Sal learned the Dara Family Secret Pizza Dough Recipe. And lo, on this day, Sal’s slice was perfected.
Joe visited the pizzeria for the first time when he was four years old. His mother dressed him up in a brand new peacoat so he could look like hot shit going to work with his dad. Sal stepped into the back to go over some paperwork, and his employee, also named Sal (we’ll call him Salvatore, though, so we don’t get confused), asked little Joe if he wanted to learn how to make pizza.
Joe was thrilled, to the extent that a four-year-old can be, at the chance to learn his father’s trade. But within minutes there was flour everywhere, and his brand-new peacoat was covered in a fine white dust, as if he’d been putting up drywall all day. He took one look at his sullied clothes and broke down into the most intense sadness he had yet felt in his short life. His father was not someone he knew. The fact that they were out together was a rare occurrence. They barely had a rapport because Sal worked so much, and whenever he was home, he was mostly a tired, grumpy disciplinarian. Joe got scared; his emotions swept over him like a great wave, and he began to cry uncontrollable, torrential tears.
Sal came running out of his office to find his son on the floor, covered in flour, weeping nonstop. He rushed to Joe’s side and lifted him up, with no concern for the flour that now coated him as well. He looked at his son with kind eyes and asked, “Joe, what’s wrong?”
Joe’s tears began to abate. He wiped away some snot. “I got my new coat all dirty. I’m sorry, Daddy. Don’t be mad.”
Sal looked down at his son, read the fear of reprisal in his face, and just melted. “Mad, Joey? How could I be mad at you?”
“Because I did something bad! I got my new coat dirty!”
“Forget the coat. Flour comes off. Your mother will clean it when we get home. The important thing is that you’re here with me now. Let’s get back to making this pie.” And they finished rolling out the dough. Sal put down the sauce, and he let little Joe sprinkle the cheese.
By the time he was ten, Joe had begun to work at the pizza place most days. “I liked the idea, initially,” he told me. “I was wearing my little shorts, workin’ in the pizza place. And my dad would always say, ‘If they ask you for your working papers, you’re just helpin’ out,’ which I was. That’s what sons are supposed to do. In the old days in Sicily, the son would watch the sheep. My job was to watch the cash register. That was my sheep.”
As a teenager, Joe was sent to military school, which was apparently the thing to do for upwardly mobile Italian families in South Brooklyn in the 1980s. You send the son to military school to teach him some discipline. Sal wanted more for Joe than he ever had. He didn’t begrudge the fact that he was doing exactly what he swore he never would—sweating it out in a pizza place, laboring with his hands instead of his mind—because it provided the financial stability needed to give his children the foundation of education to escape the poverty cycle. The American Dream at work, right in front of our very eyes. Huzzah!
The problem was that Joe liked working in the pizzeria, he liked making pizza, and he had ideas about how the place should be run. For one thing, he thought that maybe they should give the place a name, and that maybe there should be a sign outside with the name on it. And then maybe they should print that name on the pizza boxes instead of using other people’s boxes, so that when people got pizza from them they would know where it came from.
“We can’t be ‘That place behind MSG’ forever, Dad. How are we gonna sustain a customer base if no one knows what the hell we’re called?”
“What’s this ‘we,’ Joey?” Sal responded. “There is no ‘we’ here. I do this so you don’t have to. I make enough now to send you to a good school. You’ll go to college. What more do you want from me?”
But Joe wanted lots more. He would go down to his uncle Vinny’s place in Bensonhurst to work sometimes, or to his uncle Tony’s pizza place on Long Island, and they were making pepperoni pizza and Sicilian slices. Joe would ask his dad, “Why don’t you do something like that? It’s what people want.” But Sal wouldn’t budge. He had his way, and it had worked well enough so far. Why change it?
In 1987, Joe graduated high school. He stayed in the city for college, commuted from Bensonhurst to NYU to study philosophy in preparation for law school, and continued to work shifts at the pizza place a few times a week. He told me that in his philosophy classes they “talked a lot about loving humanity. It’s easy to love humanity, because humanity doesn’t smell, and humanity’s not taking a shit on your floor—it’s an abstraction. I remember coming around here to work lunch and watching humanity trying to rip us off—you know, saying ‘I gave you a twenty.’ It was basically the raw end of humanity. I’d see a guy out here every day, and his scam was to fill up an empty vodka bottle with water and then bang into, like, a businessman, and the bottle would crack on the floor and he would scream at the guy. And the businessman would get scared and give him twenty dollars to calm him down. The guy would do this all day. So this was the humanity that I knew. This wasn’t the humanity that the ivory-towered professor was talking about.”
In ’88, the economy was in the shitter, the city had declared bankruptcy, and no one had any work. Always on the lookout for a bargain, Sal decided to renovate while construction prices were low. Besides, the place needed a makeover. By the time they reopened, Joe had worn Sal down enough that he conceded on everything. He would give his place a name, and he would start serving slices with toppings. It took nearly twenty-five years for him to make a decision that most other pizzeria owners had made a decade prior; hey, progress.
As for the name, one day while they were renovating Sal was sitting in the car outside Meat Supreme in Bay Ridge, waiting for Maria to finish shopping. He looked up at the sign and thought, “Okay, that’s a name.” And there it was. He called a sign guy and had them make up a little number that said PIZZA SUPREME. However, some guy in Massapequa already had a place called Pizza Supreme, and he sent Sal a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer. They changed the name to Suprema “because it sounded more Italian and was easier than dealing with litigation.”
With all the renovations done, Pizza Suprema was really going. Everything was great: the neighborhood was getting a little safer, and Sal was loosening up the reins a bit, accepting some suggestions and criticisms. He started using plates. He bought some garlic powder. They still had to keep the oregano behind the counter to stop the drug dealers from stealing it and selling it as weed, there were still destitute old men in the process of drowning in booze passed out all over the place, but more and more people were coming to the Garden to watch sports or whatever, and the pizzeria was developing a name for itself, now that it had a name to develop.
Days passed; Sal worked. Years passed; Sal worked. One by one the kids grew up, got married, and moved out. Sal worked and worked. He never took a vacation. He’d been working his whole life. He wouldn’t have known what to do with himself on vacation, and god forbid he should retire.
In 1996, Joe passed the bar and began practicing law. “My father was so proud of me,” he told me, “but I was more proud of him. I thought what he did was more noble than what I did. I couldn’t believe how litigious our society was. It was insane. Frivolous lawsuits were rampant, and it sucked to be a part of that system. And in a way, you can’t do anything more noble than feed people. I wanted to do that, too. This might sound a little sentimental for a grown man, but I wanted to be like my dad. He never wanted me to take over this business, though. He didn’t even want me to make pizza.
“I loved the business ’cause I grew up in it, but the way he saw it, it was demeaning manual labor. He had wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, and he was prevented from following that dream because of his circumstances. He wanted what he thought was better for me. So I became a lawyer, even though I hated it.�
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In 1998, during my induction ceremony into the International Punk Gang on the tiny stage in the men’s room at CBGB, I swore an oath of disloyalty to Rudy Giuliani by reciting the lyrics to “New York City Is Dead” by the LES Stitches (You can’t drink on the street or even take a leak / Now even forty-deuce is clean!), and I still hold tight to a staunch anti-Giuliani ethos today. However, even I have to admit that though Rudy’s policies were racist, classist, and borderline fascist, his authoritarian strategy was probably a boon for some of the small businesses in some of the neighborhoods his police invaded. Which is just to say, Pizza Suprema, through no fault of their own and no active participation in the machinations of City Hall, only did better as the city got “cleaned up” from the mid-nineties through the post-9/11s.
In 2007, Sal had a heart attack at work and was taken to the hospital, where he passed away during surgery. With Sal’s death, a question arose: would Suprema continue? And how? Of the three kids, Joe was the only one who knew the pizza business. It took him no time to come to a decision. He quit the law firm and took over the pizza place. All told, Suprema was closed only on the day of the funeral.
It wasn’t easy to step into Sal’s shoes. Making pizza was easy; Joe had been doing it since he was a kid. But by 2007, a majority of the customers were regulars who had been coming in for years, some of them for their entire lives. They all wanted to know what happened to Sal, so Joe had to narrate the story of his father’s death again and again and again. Other people simply thought the pizzeria had changed hands, and they didn’t like that. The regular pizza eater, much like Sal Riggio, doesn’t take well to change. When there’s a new guy behind the counter at your pizza place, suddenly the pizza might seem a little different. And maybe it is different, but maybe it’s just a reverse placebo effect: the visible human change creates the illusion of change in the pizza. People would say, “I don’t know if I’m gonna come here anymore; the pizza changed,” which made Joe furious.
Joe told me, “I’d say ‘I’ve been working here since I was a kid.’ And they didn’t believe me, so I’d have to find a guy to say, ‘I’ve been coming here for thirty years, and I remember when Joe couldn’t reach the counter.’
“It was the Italians and the Greeks who gave me the most shit. They’d say it changed. How could it have changed? I’ve been making this dough since I was twelve years old. I started making pizza when I was thirteen. And all this new stuff? I fought for this stuff. For example, I brought stuffed pizza here. And now Pasqualle’s complaining, ‘The stuffed pizza’s not as good. Your father used to make it better.’ My father didn’t even know what stuffed pizza was!”
But Joe persevered, and life moved on. He added fresh mozzarella slices to the menu, he added sausage rolls, he started buying fresh mushrooms instead of those nasty canned ones most pizza parlors use. Most important, he installed a half dozen napkin dispensers on the walls and put spice shakers out on each table. Give the people what they want.
In the autumn of 2009, the New York Post was getting ready to run an article about this kid named Sean Taylor, who spends every October eating only pizza. Sean had decided to feature Pizza Suprema as one of his favorite places, and Joe was looking forward to the press. He thought it was the beginning of something good. People would finally know about Suprema, about his dad’s legacy.
But one day in September, Sean came into Suprema with bad news. “The Post cancelled the article. The Daily News just ran a piece about some guy who’s gonna eat a slice at every pizza place in the city. The reporter says his editor told him we can’t do my article anymore. They don’t want to seem like they’re copying.” Sean was understandably crestfallen, and Joe commiserated with him, but as soon as Sean left, Joe walked to the deli next door and forked over fifty cents for a copy of the Daily News. He flipped to the third page, found the article about me, and knew I would pick Suprema.
So he followed the blog, watching my progress down the island of Manhattan. I don’t know whether he was at the pizza shop the day Eliza and BBC and I came in. If he was, he certainly didn’t recognize me. In fact, when I walked back in that day in October after taking Tina to Port Authority to catch her bus to Philly, I ordered my slice unnoticed. It was only when I saw Joe behind the counter and introduced myself that we became friends and he introduced me to his mom, and over the course of many months they told me the wonderful story I just told you.
You wanna hear something amazing? This one afternoon we were sitting in there, Joe and I, waiting for his mom to show up so I could interview her about Italy. By way of small talk, Joe said, “You grew up around the city, right? What was your favorite slice as a kid?”
My eyes immediately glazed over in trancelike reverie as I intoned, “St. Marks Pizza. It was this little place on Third Avenue just off St. Marks. Everyone who went there loved it, but I’m not sure it was such a big deal in the pizza world, and if you weren’t hanging around the East Village in the nineties, you probably didn’t get to go.”
Joe smirked. “I think my neighbor owned that place. I’ll be right back.” He stepped outside to make a call. I bit my nails as I watched him through the window. When he hung up the phone and came back inside, he was beaming.
Guess who owned St. Marks Pizza! C’mon, it’s not a guess if you just keep reading. Really, take a second and guess in your head. Okay, did you guess yet? I like making people guess stuff. Tina hates it. Anyway, you wanna know the answer? It was Tony Dara. Tony fucking Dara, from ten houses down and across the street on Sixteenth Avenue in Bensonhurst. Tony Dara, who taught Sal Riggio how to make dough.
Listen to this shit: Tony Dara, if you recall, owned an industrial bakery that had contracts with a number of the elementary schools in South Brooklyn. Well, in the late eighties, the city defaulted on a bunch of payments to Tony’s bakery, and he realized that city contracts were a fool’s game. He sold off his warehouse and all his equipment and decided he wanted to go into business on a smaller scale, with a higher profit margin. An older guy in the neighborhood was moving back to Sicily and offered to sell Tony his pizza parlor in the East Village.
Tony agreed, and then immediately called up Sal Riggio. He said, “Sal, listen, I just bought this pizza place. Can you do me a solid and teach me how to make your sauce? Also, what cheese do I gotta buy? I got the dough down, but I need your help with the rest of this.”
And Sal was all, “A’ight, fam,” and taught him how to make pizza.
Do you understand what this means? This means that my original favorite slice of pizza, a slice that I ate for the first time when I was thirteen, from a place that shut down in 2003, and to which I probably stopped going regularly in 2001, used the same recipe as the only place to which I gave a perfect slice review out of the almost four hundred different pizza places in Manhattan. You may not agree with my taste in pizza, but you at least have to admit that I’m consistent. Of course, I wouldn’t learn of the Suprema–St. Marks connection until long after I had finished Harvesting, and I still had plenty of Manhattan to cover—and another Blast from the Past was waiting for me, though this one would prove to be unpleasant.
* * *
4. The Newsweek article is quoted on page 169 of An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn by Francis Morrone. The Morrone text lacks a citation, and I have no idea how to find a Newsweek article from 1959.
ABC No Rio, 156 Rivington Street
CHAPTER 11
Nonna’s
A few bites in, the crust just ruptured and split. It looked like when there’s an earthquake in He-Man or that awesome old X-Men cartoon and the ground splits apart in jagged chunks and there are swirling pools of brackish lava licking the walls of the newly formed precipice. That stuff is cool in cartoons, but not on my pizza.
—Slice Harvester Quarterly, Issue 7, “The Rest,” visited on February 25, 2011
Making my way downtown (walking fast, faces pass, and I’m homebound doo doobee doot doot deeee dah dooble dooble dooble), I couldn’t wait
to get to the Lower East Side and eat at Mama’s on Clinton Street, around the corner from ABC No Rio, the punkest place in New York City.
ABC is a once-squatted, now legit tenement building on Rivington Street next to the Streit’s Matzo factory on the Lower East Side. It seems very importantly NEW YORK to me that the cool, long-running autonomous space is next to a matzo factory. I have so many memories of dozens of ratty punks sprawled across the sidewalk drinking Hurricane forties and eating matzo. Frankly, they should start putting matzo out in bars alongside the peanuts, because that shit goes well with beer, and it makes you hella thirsty.
In 1989, some folks started using No Rio to host Saturday afternoon hardcore matinees in an attempt to create a space for punk performance without the thuggish violence and homophobia of the CBGB Sunday Matinee crowd. They’ve put on shows at No Rio every week since then, and they still have a strict ideological policy for their bands: no -isms or -obias (racism, sexism, classism, ablism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.) in the lyrics, and no major-label acts. It’s an amazing space and community resource, and in the nineties at least, it was an incredible place to be a teenager. I first learned about No Rio in 1996 as a thirteen-year-old lying on my bedroom floor, mesmerized by all the show fliers reproduced in the liner notes of Rancid’s second album, Let’s Go!
I daydreamed about the place for months before I got up the courage to actually go there. When I finally did, my teen BFF, Carly, walked me down from St. Marks to 156 Rivington Street, an address I had already memorized. Carly was a few months older than me, had a shaved head, and usually wore a homemade Heavens to Betsy T-shirt she had drawn with a Sharpie. I didn’t have my first Mohawk yet, and I was still in that awkward phase between adolescent skate-poser and tween punk-poser. I had replaced my Airwalks with a pair of boots, but I was still wearing all my clothes two sizes too big, a symptom of having been raised by rap radio and having just seen the movie Kids.
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