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@ pizcajj: I went to UPN on Saturday night for dinner, I paid $21 for a small pizza, and I did not feel cheated or ripped off in the least. I look at it like this. If I go to a casual chain restaurant, I pay that much by the time I'm done and I didn't get the quality of food I got at UPN. It was simply amazing food.

I can get perfectly good pizza delivered to my home where I live in New Jersey for around $12 for a large pie, from several different places. They don't follow Anthony Mangieri's strict adherence to old Italian recipes, but they are good in the great-pizzeria-up-the-street way that those who grew up in the NY-NJ area are used to.

I guess what I'm saying is that there is a place in the world of pizza for "gourmet" pizza as well as great slice joints. Just keep an open mind.

Boy, oh boy!
Isn't it sad how some of these high-profile pizza places like Una Pizza Napoletana charge the sort of prices similar to what you'd pay for a steak dinner?
The family-owned "pizza joints" throughout the tri-state area that I experienced, going as far back as the late sixties, is what I miss. Some of those places were real gems - and cheap; the way pizza is meant to be. The ones that weren't gems were many times better than the average joint you'd find today, unless you do research on great sites like this to find the few scattered ones left out there.
Since I like to have pizza once or twice a week, and don't want the inconvenience of commuting to a decent place, I now make my own. I found that the few good recipes out there which I came across after much research (a couple of years worth) yields satisfactory results, much better that your present pizza joints and just a notch or two below the past greats.
Heck...Even going to a McDonald's back in the day when they had the 'golden arch's' going through the structures and had no seating inside, was far superior in taste and freshness before Big Brother and the greedy corporate vultures (after Ray Kroc's death) moved in and ruined everything. Now, the food tastes bland, is lukewarm most of the time, and costs a lot more.
I guess that's what they call "progress".

@Paulie: I wish we could! I would love that. I wish there was a way to gank Flickr's system and just use it for blogging! They should sell that shit as a CMS!

He might be late opening. If we went on vacation, he probably wanted to fly the plane, serve the beverages and get all the bags from the aircraft to the baggage carosel by himself.

Ciao,

Paulie Gee