Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Gruppo's sister restaurant Vezzo is right near my office. we order from there once a month, and frankly I find their pies to be extremely disappointing. They use cheap ingredients that make the pies super greasy, there's not enough sauce, and the crust is too thin by nearly any standard. Also a big pet peeve of mine is that they put chopped tomatoes on their margarita (called the "fresca" there or something). Their super thin crust can't stand up to 1" square cubes of mealy tomato. They should thin slice the tomato, and they should make large meatballs and thin slice those too, rather than lumping small round meatballs on there. It's amazing how just a few small improvements could take their pizza from being kind of bad to pretty great.

I too grew up in the Burgh and for my money Mineo's proves just how accurate the Pizza Cognition Theory is. Way too many people love this horrible horrible pizza. Mineo's serves one of the worst slices I've ever eaten on repeated occasions (mostly because I used to spend a lot of time at then across the street now defunct movie rental shop Heads Together). The cheese is rubbery and tastes fake, the crust is tough, and the sauce is bland and uninspired.

Then again, a lot of people have complaints about *my* favorite Pittsburgh Pizza, Vincent's Pizza Park on Ardmore in Forest Hills, which IIRC you've also featured here, and one of my other Western PA favorites (Gino Gianelli's of Latrobe) would most certainly make pizza snobs (like me) turn up their noses.

this is such nonsense. vegans should not be allowed in difara. as if Dom doesn't take long enough to make the pies as is!

I forgot to recommend the nonna slice at Rocky's on 2nd bt 33rd and 34th which is pretty far from Empire State but worth mentioning. As for some of the other recos here are my two cents. I did not enjoy Firehouse the last time I stopped there. I also did not like Vezzo the time I tried it. It barely deserved the name pizza.

I miss Pinch, which was always tasty and high quality, but they closed and from what I heard moved uptown.

Has anybody tried the Rosa's on Fifth and 34th?

Without a doubt the best burger in the world, period. The author needs to ask for "Pittsburgh rare" next time, the fact that he didn't is telling. I get rare burgers all the time at Tessaro's. I get mine with dry bleu and add some tabasco to taste. Sometimes I get the BBQ sauce if I am feeling, well, saucy.

Boiled red skins and broccoli/cauliflower are my sides of choice. I've never once wanted fries with this burger. Trust me.

Oh, and grab an Iron City to go with your burger!!

I know that I am two years late on responding to this post, but I finally got around to making the trek to the Bronx to hit up these four joints. I have to say I am really glad I didn't go all the way out there just to sample these pies, because I was wickedly disappointed. Honestly, none of them really rise above the level of any typical Manhattan slice joint. Maybe these places have gone downhill since the original post. If so, my bad for waiting so long. Louie and Ernie's slice was perhaps the best of the bunch, but still, only slightly better than your average Ray's. Crosby was definitely the worst, their sicilian was barely edible, the pizza equivalent of a drain pour. Joe's was ok, maybe a fresh pie would have been better than the sicilian slice I had that had been sitting in the display case for what I can only assume was most of the day. The grandma slice I had at Frank's was perhaps the highlight of the Pelham bay four, it had a really nice balance of sauce, two cheeses, and a basil puree that wasn't quite pesto but gave some color to the attractive and delicate thin slice. The other pies at Frank's didn't really look very thrilling.

Just one quick note on the neighborhood. Pelham Bay kind of felt like the land that time forgot.

All in all I'd say to anybody reading this post in 2009, by all means go check these places out, I'd love to hear what people have to think. Maybe I'm just spoiled?

silly hipsters!!!

Went last night at around 7PM. Found it to be wildly overrated. Definitely NOT DiFara level. I had a plain sicilian slice, and while the ingredients were high quality and the balance of cheese/sauce/crust was ok, it was far from a great slice of pizza. WAY too much oil/grease and a really uneven crust, some parts rock hard and burnt (not charred), some soggy and falling apart. I'd give it a 7/10 at best at this point.

Also, regarding service and first impressions of the kitchen, these boys need to get organized! They're not able to efficiently handle the ten or so people who were in the restaurant while i was there. Too many cooks in the kitchen, everybody bumping into one another, no clear division of responsibility. They were making fresh artichoke/spinach pies when nobody in the restaurant was ordering from the one that was already there, and people were scrambling for plain sicilians. Granted, that's their signature, but why make more if nobody is ordering them?