The Real Thing

The trip to NYC was incredibly spontaneous, but not altogether random. We had a mission. Well, ok, or MrR had a mission and I was along for the fun of it (and, as it turned out, to make the hotel reservations, research the subway system, determine the best place to dump the car, print out directions, locate maps of NYC and basically be Julie-Your-Cruise-Director in a town I've visited exactly once...which might have annoyed me except, meh, I'm actually kinda good at those things, so it wasn't so bad).

Anyway, the mission was this...


That, my friends is pizza. Real, actual, first-generation, immigrant pizza. It's Italy on a pie plate with a side of beer (or, in Mr.R's case, a glass of sangria). To call it "fantastic" would be too pale a term to even begin to touch it, so let me try to draw you a comparison...

You know how the standard Papa John's or Dominos experience leaves you feeling like maybe you just consumed a giant sponge which is subsequently expanding somewhere below your belly button? And you start to wonder, as you gape in horror at the rapidly increasing size of your midsection, whether or not the pizza has any actual food in it...or if it's all just one big filler that's going to eventually fill you up so much that maybe you'll die some greasy, bloated, cardiac arrest sort of death?

This is exactly NOT that. This pizza is food. We theorized that there was probably more grease in the handful of Triscuits we munched in the car on the way home the next day than there was in the three slices we each had for dinner. Three slices of pizza...and, I kid you not, 2 hours later, my stomach actually growled. My body digested pizza efficiently?! I need to check, but I think that my be one of the lesser-known signs of the apocalypse.

Lombardi's Pizza is famed for being this country's first real pizzaria...and, from my experience, it is worth every bit of the hype. We got the Original: unadulterated...simple....beautiful. A light, flaky crust topped with tomato sauce (barely removed from the vine), a sprinkling of fresh basil, some roasted garlic (our only addition to the pie), and a few well placed slices of mozzarella cheese. Holy slices, Batman! It was awesome.

Mission accomplished!