It hurts to remember
My husband, the consummate pizza chef, says “Even bad pizza is good pizza.” But I cannot concur. Britannica online tells me that Americans eat roughly 100 acres of pizza a day, which seems like a lot of pizza, much of which I suspect, sadly, falls into the bad pizza category– floppy, flaccid crust, overly sweet sauce, oily pools of cheese crying out for the swab of a napkin. Good pizza, the Platonic ideal of pizza, is so much more than crust and sauce and cheese.
Pizza in 2026 is never going to be the ideal pizza, because it’s not the pizza of my youth, a slice from Broadway Pizzeria in Hewlett, NY. Broadway Pizzeria, which I have learned, thanks to Google, is permanently closed, was a short walk from my high school, which had open lunch, and just a 5 minute drive from my girlhood home on Pebble Lane.
A slice from Broadway embodied the ideal pizza qualities, thin crust with a generous handle sporting a few air bubbles, plentiful mozzarella cheese, sauce that’s the right balance of acid and umami. The lunch special back in 1992 was two slices and a can of soda for $2. Hungry students from Hewlett High flooded Broadway, lining up for their slices. Of course there were other things on the menu, calzones, sausage rolls, pizza with actual toppings, but the cheese slice was the gold standard.
Thirty years after I ate my last slice from Broadway, I can smell it now, feel the crunchy crust, see the tip of the triangle dripping cheese on my paper plate. I can feel the sticky glass canisters of “italian spices” or “crushed red pepper,” the caustic bubble of regular Coke cutting through the cheese and sauce. How many times did I slide into that orange plastic booth with Marti Winer or Jeanhee Kim? Time has blurred my arithmetic.
The only thing better than walking to Broadway for pizza during our lunch hour was going with my dad to pick it up for dinner on a busy week night. The anticipation was intense, made more vivid by the searing hot pizza boxes that I always carried home on my lap. The aroma was intoxicating, a balm to the pain/pleasure of box burning through acid-washed Jordache jeans. I remember gingerly lifting the box off of my legs at intervals on the ride home, saving myself from first degree burns. Could we have set the boxes in the back seat or the trunk? Of course, but the pain of the hot pizza box was the prelude to the delicious bite that would come after our arrival at home.
Scritch is the sound of the cardboard pizza box, opening, an invitation to take that first scorching slice, if you dare.
It hurt so good.
My husband’s pizza burns the roof of my mouth. It’s reminiscent of pizza from Broadway, but I’m not the same girl anymore, and that hurts too.
INSTANT NOODLES 