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By METROGRAPH

In honor of Untitled Pizza Movie, we asked local filmmakers and other friends of Metrograph to share their pizza-related memories and favorite spots to grab a slice, past or present.

Bedford Park Pizza Joint, Bronx, circa 1986
Pizza was never a meal to be had at a place, it was always a meal in transit. It was an in-between space from school to the subway. For us at Grace Lutheran School, it was the spot right off the Concourse and Bedford Park. The Pizzeria was on the beginning of the slope of the hill. It was bright white, small, marble tables, and tan chairs. We would gather for a moment, place our orders, and have the oven’s hot breath cover over us. But we would never eat there. We would take our slices in brown paper bags, sagging with grease, and part our last giggling goodbyes-some of us to Tracey Towers, some of us Uptown. All of us hoping to get home without harassment of Decepticons, Clinton Kids, or Westies.-Kazembe Balagun, writer/curator/
cultural historian/activist Sal & Carmine’s was THE SPOT on the Upper West Side when I was growing up in the early ’70s, when it was right next to the Symphony Theater. I think the slices used to be like 25 cents back then. As many times as I went there over the decades, though, I never saw the owners Sal and Carmine crack a smile. Those dudes were straight business! About 10 years ago, I was ordering a slice and this dude walked in saying he’d moved to North Carolina and it was his first time back in New York in 30 years. He went on to share that the first thing he wanted to do was get pizza from Sal and Carmine’s, and that he was overjoyed to see them still open (they’d moved to 101st & Broadway by then). And the whole time, Sal and Carmine were behind the counter, equipped with their cha-ching analog cash register still, and yo-their faces did not move. They were like, “You wanna a slice with a can of soda?”
They iced this dude so hard! I was rolling, hahahahhahahah, I’ll never
forget that, yo, was bananas…-Bobbito Garcia aka Kool Bob Love, DJ/author/filmmaker

A Sal & Carmine pie

Who made the best pizza? Ben’s on the corner of West 3rd and MacDougal? Will, my co-worker at New Video, came back from Ben’s one night with a box full of slices that the co-owner declared to be “seasoned beyond reason.” How about Ray’s Famous Pizza on Greenwich Avenue? (No-to me it was like pizza-in-a-cup, so thick you needed a spoon and a bib.) Koronet Pizza on the Upper West Side, where every slice was the size of an entire pie from anywhere else? (No again-fuel for Columbia students). John’s and other such higher end spots? Only if you enjoyed waiting in line for 45 minutes. I won’t lie: the best pizza I’ve ever had was made in New England. Recently, in Cambridge at Area Four, and long ago, at the Highland Restaurant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where there are still pictures of ball players from the ’40s on the walls. It was a crushing day when they decided to quit making pizza. One day I ran into the owner, Rudy.

“You guys made great pizza.”
“You liked that pizza?”
“Yeah.”
“You liked that pizza?”
“Yeah, I liked that pizza. How about giving me the recipe?”
“Why should I give you the recipe so you can make money off of it?”
“Why should you hold onto it if you’re not using it?” I was an orthodox Jew until I was 21. That meant I ate only kosher food.
One Saturday night in 1950 I was in Midtown New York with a bunch of
(non-religious) friends. At one point we passed a pizzeria. Since we were all hungry by that time, my friends decided to buy a pizza. I told them that whatever it was I couldn’t eat it because of the kosher rules. I had
never even heard of pizza. They assured me that all it had was some
cheese and tomato sauce and a crispy bread-like base. With my heart in my mouth, I joined them in a slice. It was delicious. When I got home, I went to the local library and looked up the ingredients (there was no Internet yet). Indeed, there were no non-kosher ingredients. I’ve been a fan ever since!
–Manny Kirchheimer, filmmaker John’s of Bleeker St.
Wait, hear me out! John’s has a rep as a tourist spot whose golden age came decades ago. BUT: a) It’s good b) It was my neighborhood spot after fourth-grade basketball games at Carmine Street Gym. That’s history right there! c) Why you hate tourists so much? You’re not better than tourists. And your golden age came decades ago too. Stop throwing stones.

Also, it’s pizza. Don’t overthink it. Do the dough, cheese, and sauce they put in their oven come out tasting good? Yes = good pizza. Is the vibe lively? Yes = good pizza place. See, a pizza place doesn’t need to be cool or have a bunch of insider rules. Beware of anyone trying too hard with a, “There’s a hole-in-the-wall where if you know Vinny Pizzaface or Freddie Pepperoni they’ll hook it up. Don’t piss ’em off though, oh!”

John’s of Bleecker St.

Back when I first moved to New York and was working as an assistant for the artist Jack Youngerman, I was introduced to John’s Pizza on Bleecker Street. It was a pretty famous spot at the time and a slice of John’s was about the perfect lunch. One day I bumped into Harvey Keitel there, when he was shooting a scene from James Toback’s Fingers. Pizza was pretty much the fuel for a lot of young artists at the time. “Let’s grab a slice” was synonymous with saying, “You got a few minutes?” Steve Buscemi and I used to lean on the counter at John’s Pizza on the corner of St. Marks and 1st Ave. after catching his show in the basement of the St. Mark’s Church. Another night over at John’s, I met Basquiat, who probably had just rolled out of a night spot like myself and needed a slice before hitting the sack at 5 a.m. He told me how much he wanted to make films, and together we shared the kind of camaraderie of youthful dreamers who saw nothing but horizons on the downtown streets. Pizza stands were like saloons in old Westerns: you’d enter, people would quickly size you up but then go right on with their chatter.

It took 30 steps to get to Rosco’s from my apartment on Franklin Ave. A few blocks away was the more upscale Barboncino, more of a traditional Italian pizza restaurant to Rosco’s more relaxed Italian-American joint. Every time I’d walk over to Rosco’s during the summer of 2014, the pizzeria felt like an exotic, faraway destination. It felt surreal to walk in there and get the kind of male attention unknown to me just a few months prior. It was the summer I was far enough along in my transition to start presenting as a woman, my-as they put it these days-“hot girl summer.” On a crisp Saturday morning, I’d go with my roommate to Coney Island for a kvass at one of the Russian restaurants on the boardwalk. It’d be dusk and muggy when we get home so we’d pop by Rosco’s for a pepperoni or grandma slice. (They also do heroes, rice balls, pasta dishes, and garlic knots.) It wasn’t just the pizza that stayed with me-crust, textures, cheese, and all-it was that moment in time: me inching ever closer to womanhood, the Crown Heights air thick with possibility, turning someone on as I devoured a grandma pizza AND
relishing both. (Meanwhile, I’ve moved out of Crown Heights, Rosco’s
closed in 2018, and a vegan pizzeria, Screamer’s, opened in its place.)
–Isabel Sandoval, filmmaker

Chicken Parmigiana Pizza from Lo Duca

Apologies to my Abruzzese in-laws on “the other side,” but my fondest pizza associations are mostly NYC-related. My parents, both deep-root city natives only too happy to compare their vanished formative years with my actual ongoing ones, never mentioned pizza in relation to their childhoods on the Upper East Side and Brooklyn, respectively. The family white-flighted out of NYC the year after I was born and the pizza of my childhood was largely confined to a sit-down family joint in Johnson-era Greenwich, Connecticut. Returning to NYC full-time in ’81 forever reconfigured my pizza consciousness toward the slice. Downtown Manhattan was a pizza orchard in those days. Pizza slices were the default soul food for a decade or more of (mostly drunk or hungover) encounters, observations, accidents, puzzlements, opportunities, and all of those countless unassigned moments people now avoid by looking at their phones. The consumption of pizza was a semi-uniform constant underscoring the insane density of parallel and piled-up social strata, neighborhoods, default tribalism and enchanting weirdness that made NYC the full-contact paradise it was. Pizza was the cud I chewed over a decade-long dawning realization that I may not have really belonged to any of it but I was here, I wasn’t going to leave, and it was all okay anyway.

There was an early ’80s consolation trip to Ben’s on MacDougal St. (closest decent slice to Bleecker Bob’s final storefront) after a group of heavily medicated NYU dorm buddies and I were courteously but firmly turned away from a Sun Ra show at Danceteria by a doorman who instructed us to “come back with dates, fellas.” In spring of ’82, a then-recently (and, as I recall, explosively) out college chum used the pretense of an allegedly “better than Stromboli’s” slice (not that much of an achievement) almost all the way west on Christopher Street to walk me and another uptight straight suburban classmate through a pre-HIV army of Village People variations cruising each other everywhere you looked. The pizza conversation in those first few years frequently fell back to the relative merits of the Ray’s on 6th Avenue-a decent slice turned into an added cheese freakshow that was probably more calories per piece than I now consume in a day. When the (long-gone) movie-theater appendage of the Public Theater ran all six episodes of the original BBC Singing Detective back-to-back, the manager announced that the theater was suspending its “no food” rule for the occasion. During an intermission, my buddy Perkins ran out for a whole pie to split between him, his date, me, and mine, only to discover that the guy who boxed it out of the oven forgot to slice it. We tore pieces off it in the dark during the last three episodes, eventually emerging onto Lafayette St. with our clothes streaked with dried sauce like vintage Kensington Gore.

Rosemarie’s on First Ave. was sort of the heirloom punk-rock pie spot. Handsome Dick Manitoba from The Dictators lived upstairs, and Voidoids Richard Hell and Bob Quine were frequent customers along with my old radio buddy The Hound. Through the ’90s and the aughts, anything rock ‘n’ roll related intersected with Antonio’s on Flatbush Avenue, the closest slice to my primary bandmates Prospect Heights home and label headquarters.

I can’t even remember the last time I had a slice, now. Maybe from a place on 30th Ave in Queens near the Astoria/Woodside border? Whenever it was, not long after their gates stayed down and, supposedly, the guy that ran the place vanished back to Italy a few steps ahead of his creditors. These days I’m more on the spinach roll wavelength. The last pie I had was a schmantzy Neapolitan thin-crust job purchased from a sit-down place in Hudson, NY, doing take-out business under pandemic rules. We sprinkled it with arugula, something you couldn’t have waterboarded me into doing 30 years ago. It was delicious.
–Bruce Bennett, writer/musician