Improbably enough, there is an excellent Italian restaurant in Zomba, but they don’t serve pizza. I did, however, discuss pizza with the owner, not in order to demand that he make it but in order to get in my point, which is that a truly great NY slice of pizza can hold its head up among all the pizza in Italy and the world over. He didn’t quite agree—he thought that there were perhaps one or two establishments in all of New York City that could be said to serve a decent pizza, and seemed to think that New York pizza is too often covered with too many toppings (no! no! that’s California!)—but I dropped the point before insisting that the pizza in my own small hometown of Greenport can, in fact, hold its head high over all the pizza I’ve ever had in New York City or, for that matter, anywhere in the world. I once asserted this belief in order to get rid of a young Italian man who was flirting with me at the pool in Germany, and it worked. So just bear that in mind as a helpful hint should you need to make yourself seem odious to an Italian, or should you wish not to do so.
{here are the praises I’ve sung to Brick Oven in the past.}
