Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Anybody ever driven a car around the narrow streets of New York? Some days you could spend 45 minutes inching along one mile of highway. The entire time, you're looking around at how many cars and trucks are trying to cram into a space that was designed for a small fraction of them. The patience-testing experience has you swearing off a repeat performance. But that doesn't mean one should write off ever driving a car here. Believe it or not, there are actually times when driving around New York is not only easy but--dare I say it?--quite pleasant. Enter Di Fara. Nothing said here is an embellishement. Walking into Di Fara at 4 p.m. on a Saturday is like driving into the Theater District for a Wednesday matinee during Xmas season. Just as our roads haven't changed much in the last fifty years (nor should they!), neither has Mr. DeMarco. Same roads no matter how many more cars there are. Same approach to making pizza, whether there are 3 customers or 103 customers. The skinny: There *are* times when Di Fara is just another pizza place, at least in terms of crowds. Those are the only times I'm willing to go. Just as I'm not disclosing my parking secrets in a public forum, same goes for my Di Fara secrets. This reminds me of that Yogi Berra quote: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." And when Yogi goes to Di Fara, his pizza is is cut into only six slices ...

Settle down, Beavis. Maybe I need a class on how to post things on the Internet. Between you and the Syracuse guys, everyone thinks I'm picking fights. I'm just making conversation. All in good fun. I don't mean to be smarmy, but at the end of the day this is still just pizza we're talking about. The only thing I really meant to take issue with was calling Mr. DeMarco's pizza-making "careless." It's reasonable to call the place too hot or the waits too long or even the pizza not worth those sacrifices. But Mr. DeMarco cares too much, not too little. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Genug shoyn!

On the one hand, Nicky says that most pizzerias "don't know how to keep pizza fresh on the counter." On the other hand, Nicky doesn't like Di Fara because "the time it takes to actually go in and get a pie really takes away from the experience of enjoying the pizza itself." Come again? The whole point of Di Fara is that there is no counter. Food is made only as needed. That way, nothing sits on the counter. There's nothing wrong with grab-and-go pizza. But Di Fara is not the place to go to fill a void. I'm not sure Famous Famiglia is, either. I'd rather go hungry. If you don't like Di Fara, that's fine. Each person has his own taste parameters. But saying that Mr. DeMarco merely "whips up pizza" and is "careless" in doing so is just not true. He lives and breathes nothing but pizza for more than 80 hours a week, and sweats every detail in every pie. You are entitled not to like the result, but don't create a false impression to justify that opinion.

You obviously spent your law-school years refining your pizza palate, something I never thought of doing back in the day. To wit, none of these names even rings a bell. Even your lone place on the Hill is well after my time, as is its predecessor. (Some alums in the office filled in the gaps for me.) What does one do at SU if not eating pizza or whining about the weather? Here's my manifesto of the top 11 brands of 40s I drank as a freshman: 11. Icehouse 10. Pabst Blue Ribbon 9. Golden Anniversary 8. Country Club 7. Ballantine 6. Genesee 5. Colt 45 4. Schlitz Red Bull 3. Schlitz Malt Liquor 2. St. Ides 1. Old English Eating pizza is much more fun, so kudos to your list. Come out to Forest Hills one day. You'll feel guilty about publishing a list without Nick's.

I'd like to nominate No. 2 pencils for our top 10 list of the best writing instruments. Watermelon is easily the best member of the Cucurbitacae family. Oh, and despite what you may have heard elsewhere, white is still the best color for toilet paper. Last time I checked, pizza in Syracuse was about as good as the SU football team. I can't even name 10 pizza joints in the Salt City. I can't name 10 football players, either.

The Jeno's commercial looks like a page from Rowan and Martin's Laugh In. Fun stuff.

I don't disagree with any of the sentiments expressed here. I admit that I love the pizza and the whole scene at Di Fara to a fault. I'm willing to tolerate things there I, too, have had to remind Dom more than once about an order that I would never tolerate anywhere else. But isn't that typical of life in New York? I live seven miles from the office, which is at most a 15- to 20-minute commute in most of the country. It takes me 45 minutes on a good day and more than 90 minutes on a bad day, a delay that's largely unpredictable and unavoidable. That says nothing of standing on a platform at 3 a.m. watching the rats move faster along the tracks than I am. I get home to a roach-infested apartment that, while reasonably priced by New York standards, would still cost half as much anywhere else. And even when my pizza is delivered in short order, it costs $2.50 a slice. There are a lot of hardships to living here. For most people, it's not worth the hassle and expense, and I don't blame them. Di Fara is just another example of that struggle. I liked New York better before chain stores choked the streets, tourists flooded the sidewalks, and wealthy people stole the city from those who built it. Just like Di Fara, New York was more pleasant before "the word got out." I have thought about giving up on New York, but it's home. Just like Di Fara. Everything on that menu, from the pizza to the potato-and-egg hero, is better than it is everywhere else. If the answer is that we should keep it to ourselves so that we can order a pizza in 30 minutes or less, isn't that selfishness counterintuitive to a pizza Web log or Chowhound? Note to the management: There are definitely still off-hours. But I'm not sharing them in a public forum.

Di Fara is not the problem. It's the victim of a much larger problem. Too often, pizza is viewed as fast food. Di Fara is anything but fast food. In pretty much any restaurant, people are used to having their food delivered in less than 30 minutes. When someone says a restaurant has "good service," what they mean is the food made it from kitchen to table in short order. The problem isn't Di Fara; it's our culture, which demands speed in everything. Yes, it takes longer for Di Fara to produce your pie a lot longer, in fact. If time is your primary concern when eating out, there are no shortage of other places that will meet your needs. But when you go to Di Fara, you are engaging in something other than fast food. When I go to Di Fara, I know what I'm in for. I bring a book. But even without reading material, there's enough to keep you busy there. Commisserate with fellow patrons; share your Di Fara strategies with others; talk with Mr. DeMarco about his tomatoes or his family or whatever; pick your own herbs from the plants in the window; learn to speak a little Italian; uncork a bottle of wine; do some shopping along Avenue J and learn to speak a little Hebrew or Yiddish; study Mr. DeMarco's every move as he makes a pie (amazingly, this never gets old); grab a rag, and clean the tables; take out the garbage. Over the years, I have done all of these things while waiting for a Di Fara pie. It has become part of the experience an experience I wouldn't change a bit. There's a group of off-duty cops who pass the time by playing cards. Waiting an hour for Mr. DeMarco's pie makes you appreciate it even more. I could list a dozen ways in which Mr. DeMarco could speed up his operation. But all of them would hinder the final product. To me, that final product is what's most important. Why the hurry? Life's too short. Throw out the cellular phone, unplug your laptop and television, and wait an hour for your pizza. Slow down; you just might enjoy it more.

Maybe Heywood Jablome is new slot man at the Post.

I'll give you the characters for Hebrew and Yiddish. Barbara Billingsley and I are working on the jive translation.

Singa's Pizza was on hand to represent Queens? And people took this seriously? I've got no beef with DeMarco's, but methinks the fix was in. You see, there's this place in Forest Hills. It's called Nick's. If you haven't heard of Nick's, you haven't heard of pizza.

I vote for bringing back the five-borough pizza tour, which had but one tour of duty--and ended up touching only four boroughs. That was some day.