If you LOVE pizza. This spot is a must try!!
Only if you love pizza..
(story from GQ)
The Far Side (of the Hudson)
On April 20, 2010 at 5:27 PM
Alan Richman ventures across state lines in search of the perfect pizza.
Santillo’s Brick Oven Pizza isn’t far from Manhattan, maybe 15 miles, but getting there means making your way through the Holland Tunnel, past the Statue of Liberty (off to your left), over the Pulaski Skyway, and into the Historic Midtown Business District of Elizabeth, New Jersey. To a New Yorker, that’s the equivalent of crossing the River Styx into the Underworld.
To me the trip isn’t bad, because I was born in New Jersey and spent my pre-school years in Hillside, which is about three miles from Elizabeth, named one of "America's 50 Greenest Cities" by Popular Science in 2008. I don’t know why a technology magazine is evaluating greenery, but I have to concede there were plenty of cherry trees blossoming as I drove through town.
Back in those Hillside days, my family lived in the same apartment complex as a Yankee star of the ‘40s and ‘50s, Phil Rizzuto, so when I walked into Santillo’s and saw a black-and-white framed photo of the old shortstop on the wall, I felt right at home, or at least the home I knew more than a half-century ago. A pal of mine, Eric Levin, a senior editor at New Jersey Monthly Magazine, had told me that Santillo’s has the best pizza in a state with no shortage of great pizza, so between that boast and my Yankee credentials, I figured I’d have plenty of conversational material to engage Al Santillo, the owner. He took over from his father, who had taken over from his father. In pizza years, the place goes back nearly to the dawn of time.
Al couldn’t have been nicer, although I believe he found me a little uppity, not because I was a New Yorker but because I was from Hillside, which he said was “a step up from Elizabeth, kind of the suburbs.” I never knew my folks were that well off, but I guess I should have, considering that we lived near a Yankee, a really swell one. I remember walking up to Rizzuto’s apartment when I was five or six and handing him a baseball to sign. He was nice, too. You want nice, you’ve come to the right state. When I got lost finding my way to Santillo’s (Jersey signage being what it is), a stranger driving a car with a “We Support New Jersey Troopers” bumper sticker led me practically to the front door.
Santillo’s is take-out, with no tables and plenty of parking on the street. The entrance is down an alley, past a sign out front reading Santillo’s Italian Bread Pizza. You can take your pie outside and eat it on the hood of your car. If you desire more amenities, you’re welcome to bring it to Vasco Da Gama restaurant, a couple blocks away. Turns out Jersey is so nice that restaurants will let you eat the food from other restaurants.
Santillo’s was almost empty when I arrived in mid-afternoon this past Saturday. Al seemed to enjoy the unexpected company, so I hung around instead of taking my order out. We talked and I drank root beer from his cooler while he cooked. He loves to talk pizza. He showed me the table where his father had rolled out dough, lovingly pointing to a gentle indentation in the table, the wood worn away by his father’s hands pressing down hard. He pointed out small, dark scars burned into the wood by ash dropping from his father’s cigarettes. “He must have rolled a million pizzas there,” Al said.
Santillo’s is a fabulous pizzeria. I’ve never been to another quite like it. It’s attached to the house where Al grew up, and he makes every shape, size, and style of pie you can imagine, with names never before seen, and he does it without varying from the norm. No weird toppings. Only one kind of dough, made from the same ingredients that go into his Italian bread, but handled differently. Plenty of cheese, olive oil, and toppings, no skimping. Natural yeast. Herbaceous tomato sauce, very old-world. A larger-than-life brick oven dating from 1904, once coal-burning but reconfigured for natural gas. I asked Al how hot it got, and he replied, “I’ve had it to 1000 degrees—when I screwed up.”
His black steel pans, most of them dating back to near-antiquity, add a lot to the pies. I noticed a few pieces of warm, golden-brown crust sitting on one of them, baked scraps of leftover pizza dough, and they tasted rich and oily and salty, like American-style focaccia. He insisted that he hadn’t done a thing to the dough, the pan had done it all. Root beer and scraps. I could have spent the afternoon dining on nothing else.
At Santillo’s you can order in typical fashion, ask for a standard (somewhat rectangular), a round or a Sicilian pie, offered in small, medium, large, or extra-large, with a choice of 25 different toppings, which means you could spend half your life trying every combination. Or you can listen to Al. He tipped me off to the fried eggplant made by his wife, Lorraine, and I can say without reservation that I’ve never had better—it’s thin, juicy, crispy, succulent, unmatched. She also cooks up nice broccoli, which I ordinarily hate on pizza or anywhere else, but not when it’s as fresh and crunchy as hers. Have it on the white pie, and if you’re getting that combo, ask Al not to swirl the cheese and the broccoli together, which he likes to do. It tastes better his way, I admit, but it doesn’t add to the aesthetics, and Al makes gorgeous, rustic pies.
I asked Lorraine which pizza she preferred, and she recommended a 1957/'64. Allow me to explain. A lot of the specialty pies are named for the years in which they were conceived, starting with the 1940, which is a plain tomato pie without cheese. The 1957/'64 is the 1957 crust (extra thin) with the 1964 toppings (mozzarella, parmesan, olive oil). It was wonderful, but I preferred Al’s standard crust, especially when left in the oven a little longer than usual for added crispness. Al loves playing with crusts, sometimes leaving them in the steel pans until done, sometimes sliding them onto the bottom of the brick oven, sometimes cooking them a little less, sometimes a little more. If you’re taking your pie home (or to Vasco Da Gama), he will cook them a little longer so the steam that saturates the box doesn’t make the pies soggy. Al thinks creatively and intensely about pizza, the same way da Vinci thought about paint.
Al’s still a pretty young guy, born in 1957, so you’ve got plenty of time before the Santillo family tradition is no more. He and Lorraine have a daughter, Cherie, who was helping out in the shop when I was there, but she told me she has no interest in taking over the business. I asked her if she felt guilty about letting the family secrets fade away, and she said, “They won’t. My father told you them all.”
639 South Broad Street, Elizabeth, NJ; 908-354-1887
Related: "American Pie," Alan Richman's June 2009 roundup of the 25 best pizzas on earth.
— Alan Richman
Read More http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2010/04/the-far-side-of-the-hudson.html#ixzz0njU2pG9B
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