Lombardi's, Oct. 27, 2005

Lombardi's
32 Spring Street

My teacher at I.C.E, Brian Buckley, who also owns and operates Plan B Consulting, a restaurant consulting practice that has been used by some notable figures in the NYC (and London)restaurant scene for helping fix problems as mundane as what utensils should be used to more important problems like losing money (is it theft or poor management of food costs?), took us to Lombardi's, "America's first pizzeria" tonight to taste their charcoal fueled-oven cooked pizzas.

The result was numerous amounts of pies. To save space and time, I'll do a brief review of what we sampled.

House salad - the tomatoes were remarkably sweet, red onions were crisp and flavorful but not bitter, greens were clean and crisp. Much better than expected, even for just a side salad.

Plain Pie - The San Marzano tomato sauce makes this pie sing. Delicious and made in the Margherita style, this is the quintessential pizza. There is no need to add toppings to this pizza. And evidence of this was found when we tried multiple varities.

The pepperoni was okay and probably the second best pizza topping. The best was the meatball pie. Housemade meatballs that relied on pork and veal (I don't think it had any beef in it) were delicious and reminded me of meatball parms from good ol' (and dearly missed) Allendale Pizza. Other toppings were marginal at best. The sausage was a dissapointment and the highly anticipated pancetta pizza was a waste. The white pizza was pretty good if uneven and due to the heavy rains the week earlier, we didn't get a chance to sample the clam pizza. Which, to Lombardi's credit, proves that they are responsible foragers. I think their was also a broccoli pie and a mushroom pie but I was full at that point.

Lombardi's is excellent, no doubt, and a cultural landmark, but stick to their plain and meatball pies (or I suppose the clam when they have them, though I can't attest to its quality).

Photo credit goes to the Pizza Specialist himself, at Sliceny.com. The one at the top of the page is from Lombardi's website.