Pizzeria Del Corso, Papa Leone… What About Delmar?
We Brooklynites, we know how to gush about our local pizza places. We have our favorites, and the rest are “just pizza.” For chrissakes, we build entire childhood memories around those special pies that daddy took us to eat. Forget the Thanksgiving Turkey – the pizza pie is the most highly-esteemed family meal on Brooklyn’s table.
That’s why, if you’re a pizza blogger, and you bounce around to foreign neighborhoods – visiting some pizzerias and not others, and declaring some better than others – you’re gonna upset some locals.
Take Jeffrey Tastes, a blogger who’s touring Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island and Manhattan, nibbling bites of well-known local establishments. Jeffrey came down to Sheepshead Bay and visited just two pizzerias, kicking off the knee-jerk reaction of, “‘Ey, yo, what the eff?!”
Granted, the two he picked are great local pizzerias.
He visited Manhattan Beach’s Papa Leone’s (103 Oriental Boulevard), where he admired the crust – “Staring that orange-stained coastline down … The thin crust proves itself unique and a deserving member of the Brooklyn pizza family.”
After that, he made his way over to Pizzeria Del Corso (3003 Avenue U) – a newer contender for neighborhood King Slice. About this place, Jeffrey couldn’t contain his admiration:
This is slice to study. It’s got a corn flour dusted, unique tasting, flavorful crust. Along the bottom edge of the pie, the crunch of the crust is a little thicker and more substantial than I am used to. It’s probably consistently about 3mm high. This isn’t something that usually stands out in a pie, but it does here. It captures the aroma of the oven and strong-arms the crust aroma inside of itself. It’s still thin though, nearly cracker like. But again, what does it for me is their outstanding sauce, which is among the top-tier of the city.
And yet, he left out some key information that makes Pizzeria Del Corso particularly interesting: owner Nino Coniglio is a star member of the U.S. Pizza Team, he’s trained in pie-making by DiFara’s Dom DeMarco, and he uses some pretty unique ingredients to the area (including house-made fresh mozzarella).
So yeah, they were great choices. But I live here. And I live closer to Delmar Pizzeria, which is the pizzeria my memories are based around. Then there are some other local greats like Knapp Pizza or V & S Pizza, or longtime neighbors like Trios. Oh, and what about…
You know, that’s the difficulty. When you know a neighborhood, you know its pizza. And the idea that a tour can only include two places would make most of our heads explode when deciding which two will make the cut.
So let’s get rid of the two-place limit and come up with a real Tour d’Pizza a la Sheepshead Bay. What places are on your list?
