no. 87: street corner high

I have a recurring dream in which Mama’s Too is my neighborhood pizza joint. In this dream my diet involves a lot more pizza than it should, but that’s the price you pay when your neighborhood pizza joint makes some of the best pizza in the world. 

In reality, my neighborhood pizza joint is Armando’s, which has been serving croutons in grease puddles since 1971. I’ve regretted every meal I’ve had there, but somehow it remains an annual ritual. Their pizza is the extrusion of an industrial food system. The round pie is stretched almost to transparency, and if you eat at one of their four tables it crackles like old parchment crumbling. Within two minutes, the wheels are off the pumpkin and it’s sludge on cardboard. The first bite of their Sicilian slice plummets down your gullet like a stooping hawk and splashes down like molten lead, a Richard Serra in your stomach. The rest is a pile driver, each subsequent bite lands with a clang you feel in your bones. I get the Sicilian more often than I get the round. 

Armando’s sits right on the line between professor’s row and what used to be working class Cambridge, the three-deckers where the folks who put the work in the brickworks lived. It feels like the kind of place where everyone met and nodded at each other and talked about baseball. There’s another pizza place two blocks away, and no one ever talks about it. Their product is, if anything, less distinguished than Armando’s, lower variance, less memorable. 

Maybe it’s not the pizza at Armando’s that people go for, but the room. The veneer on the walls might be older than me, and a line of thank you plaques from the little league team stretches unbroken back to 1974. Everything is lacquered the same shade of nicotine brown, the plaques, the walls, the slovenly rack of chips beside the soda fountain, the photo from the 2007 World Series. It’s the color of age, the color of the smell, of flour slowly incinerating in an oven that never gets a day off. I don’t know how long the guys at Armando’s have been there. As far as I know they’re baked into the place, like the grease in the hood. I see them once a year, but they talk to everyone like they see them every week. Armando himself used to be there till he joined the great pizza counter in the sky in 2016, unchanging as the cookies by the register, the ones in clear cellophane that’ll survive the fall of civilization. 

I’m sure Armando’s tastes like nostalgia to a good part of Cambridge. Hell, it tastes like nostalgia to me. The grease slick is 2am in college, the crust  tastes like additives and long evenings in tiny apartments, the cheese is my first meal at Pizza Hut. There’s something just a little awful about nostalgia tasting like cheese from a factory and tomatoes from a can. 

And I want to like Armando’s. I want to like the place that was someone’s life for 50 years before he handed it to his children. The place looks like it’s held up by the patina, but it might actually be held up by the love of the neighborhood, the goodwill stretching back as far as that line of plaques. Its humility is strength. And yet. Desire is a twisting, many-stranded thing, a river delta, shifting beneath me. 

Mama’s Too makes me feel, in the best way, a glutton. I can’t tell you what the interior looks like, even though I’ve eaten more pizza there than at Armando’s. The first bite of their pizza makes everything else seem very small and miles away. 

I can tell you the round slice at Mama’s Too is thin and crisp as a silicon wafer. The crust is a magical substance that should be engineered in a cleanroom – but no, it’s being made right there, by a guy wearing flour the way James Bond wears a suit. The cornicione – if you can apply that word to a New York slice – is round and full as a bagel, the middle stays straight as an acrobat’s spine under the weight of the sauce. It stays that way even on the third slice. It tastes like flour and time and fermentation. This slice, the plain slice, the simple slice, has gracenotes. Aged parmesan and basil shredded over it as they call your name. A sauce that smiles at you, warm as the nonna you never had. I know for a fact that they use pizza cheese like Armando’s, but somewhere in the shop it transubstantiates – isn’t that how communion works?

The squares at Mama’s Too are a genus of their own. They stand in relation to the squares at Armando’s, or indeed any other square pie I’ve ever had, as a T-rex stands in relation to a chicken. They’re hulking, shaggy things, built like their maker, a guy named Frank Tuttolomondo who looks like he bench presses his pizza oven in sets of 5. They remind you why pizzas are called pies, the toppings flow like magma. The bottom is something more than a crust, it’s a tahdig, an apex predator potato chip, a workout for your teeth, sintered titanium to hold back the landslide above. 

The kitchens at Mama’s Too and Armando’s are almost identical, like their menus: round pie, square pie, sandwiches. Regular deck ovens, stoves that have seen the wars. Mama’s, too, is an endpoint of the industrial food system, the same ingredients coming on different trucks. Once you realize this, the difference in their pizza feels like a tragedy, but maybe that’s the voice of my gluttony. I’d feel more virtuous if I loved Armando’s for what it is, but my better angels get bogged down in the quicksand on my plate. 

The neighborhood slice shop has one job, which is to offer escape. Escape from your desk, from the responsibility of cooking, from the kids, from the grey blur of too-familiar surroundings and too-familiar faces. I want pizza that’s transporting, consoling, absorbing enough that I stop thinking about everything else for just eight minutes. I want a slice that makes me notice the beauty of the sidewalk, that makes the dogwoods look like tapestry, that makes the sunshine feel warmer on my walk home. I want pizza that wipes my mind as clear and clean as an hour of sweat and agony on the mat. This doesn’t seem like it should be hard, for pizza practically evolved to be ambrosial: fat, simple starches, salt, umami, acid and sweetness from the sauce. And yet.

I like to think the potential to be as good as Mama’s Too lives in every slice shop on every street corner in every neighborhood in the US of A. Maybe this is faith in humanity, maybe this is an addict thinking every corner might bring their next high. Sometimes it makes the city feel like a ruin; the signs saying “pizza” are gravestones. 

But the truth is I found out about Mama’s Too from  the New York Times. It’s been years since I got a slice there without having to watch an influencer influencing, and each selfie stick and handheld gyro is a reminder that maybe Mama’s Too is something more than a slice shop, that maybe normal slice shops don’t actually get this good. Armando started making pizza because he needed to eat. The Times accused Frank of trying to reinvent the New York slice. Those are different goals. Are the buzzing clouds of influencers the price or the reward for Frank’s endeavors?

On some level I wish Armando’s was Mama’s Too because I want that to be the reward for fidelity to daily tasks. I want a world in which the slice shop on your corner is that good, not just because I am a glutton, but because it means every one of those cooks stretching a pie has quietly found their way to something magical, crusts that should emerge from clean rooms, sauce like the best summer of your childhood. I hope that’s what Armando tasted in his pizza.

Mama’s Too, late one night last summer.

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Even if you just want to make good pizza, you wind up selling frozen pizza in supermarkets. A lovely interview with Anthony Mangieri of Una Pizza Napoletana.

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If you’ve read this far, you’d probably like to know that I’m popping up this Thursday at Lamplighter Brewing on Broadway.

Chye tau kueh (fried radish cake), Hainanese chicken curry, and other things. Hawker food is very much beer cuisine. Classically that beer is Tiger, kept on ice and drunk from small glasses so it doesn’t warm up in Singapore’s heat. The beer at Lamplighter will be somewhat better, the climate will be somewhat milder, but you can still get it in a small glass.

My last plate of chye tau kueh, at Bukit Timah Food Centre. With any luck, I’ll get close on Thursday.