A Tale of Two Pizzas

Park Slope is having a pretty good year when it comes to pizza. In addition to the time-tested array of slice joints lining Fifth and Seventh avenues, we’ve recently pulled in a fresh crop of the newer, more genteel breed of pizzerias, attentive to both interior design and high-quality ingredients.

Everybody has their favorite pizza parlor, perhaps as often as not determined largely by proximity to one’s home or easy access to a hot greasy slice when stumbling drunkenly up the subway stairs late at night. But there will always be a few places that rise above the rest and make enough of a case for themselves to lure you dozens of blocks away from your doorstep in search of their bounty.

We recently decided to pay a visit to two South Slope pizzerias that are widely considered the best of their respective breeds. , on Sixth Avenue between 21st and 22nd streets, is a member of the new guard, a proper restaurant with forks and knives and a pedigree connecting it to Carroll Garden’s much-hyped Lucali. Luigi’s is an old-school storefront joint, a block west on Fifth Avenue, serving up pies that some insist rival Midwood’s DiFara.

We started at Giuseppina’s, arriving for dinner at 7:30 on a Friday night. We were pleased to find that even during prime outing hours, there was no wait for a table, an advantage that both of these southerly spots hold over better-known rivals. Giuseppina’s interior is elegant and simple, dimly lit with candles and warm with exposed brick walls and an open, white-tiled kitchen. The menu here, carefully written out on a single chalkboard for the whole room, is exceptionally simple: you can have pizza or calzone. No salads, no antipasti, no baked ziti or garlic knots.

For purposes of fair comparison, we ordered a pepperoni pizza, figuring that we could get a roughly comparable pie at Luigi’s. (Okay, full disclosure: we ordered half pepperoni and half with the grilled artichoke special.) (Okay, one more disclosure: we also ordered the much-praised calzone. It was as spectacular as we’d heard, richly creamy with its mix of ricotta and mozzarella cheeses, studded with fresh mushrooms and kalamata olives.) 

Our pie emerged from the brick oven with the crust of my fondest pizza-dreams, airy and bubbly around the edges, light-textured and substantially charred. A wide rim lies unadorned around the pies, with the toppings gathered toward the middle so you can enjoy a bit of crust on its own. And unlike too many pizzas of the fancy-genre thin crust, the base stays crispy all the way through, even under the toppings.

The pizzas are made with three types of cheese: buffalo mozzarella, cow mozzarella, and a sprinkling of pecorino romano, hitting just the right combination of milky, salty and a tiny bit funky. The coins of high-quality pepperoni were sliced thickish and offered hits of faintly tart, faintly spicy porkiness. We greedily availed ourselves of the free (upon request) garlic and fresh basil.

The one weak link here was the tomato sauce, which, in spite of all we’ve heard about hours of focused stirring and seasoning, was just a little underwhelming, without the sort of bright tartness that makes the best pizza sauce pop.

The pies here are $20 ($4 cheaper than Lucali), with regular toppings running an additional $3. (The artichoke special topping was $6.)

Luigi’s is an absolute paragon of a very different type of pizzeria. Its wood-paneled walls and old-fashioned cash register give you the sense that it was transported through time directly from 1973, the year of its opening. Even the Fanta stickers on the soda fountain are from another era.

The theme song from Cops might be blaring from the TV as you wait for your order, and Luigi’s seems infinitely more concerned with satisfying the steady stream of hungry neighbors than impressing nosy foodies.

“What kind of oven is that?” I asked the young boy at the counter (dressed in a white paper hat like Matt Saracen at the Alamo Freeze). He shrugged his shoulders. “A pizza oven,” he said.

The basic crust at Luigi’s is a little denser and heartier than its Sixth Avenue neighbor’s. (You can also get a thicker-crusted Sicilian-style square pie.) I suppose it needs to be thicker in order to hold up in the slice cases at the counter. It’s still excellent, though, savory and crisp all the way through to the middle, and light enough to gobble down—though if you’re a crust sissy like me, you might find yourself wishing for a little olive oil to wash down those last few bare bits.

Once again, for the purposes of rigorous scientific comparison, we ordered the fresh mozzarella pie with pepperoni ($17.75 for the regular size, which fed two very hungry and highly ambitious eaters). In this case, the fresh mozzarella (which appeared to come from only one species of bovine) is applied to the pie toward the end of its baking, on top of the pepperoni. Once the cheese has been suitably baked and melted, the pie is retrieved from the oven and squirted with Luigi’s own brand of magic, a sauce of fresh basil and olive oil. They say the herbs come from the owner’s own garden.

The pepperoni is a good notch or two above standard, and while the squares of mozzarella don’t have the milky freshness of some of your more artisanal findings, it’s still a superlative topping. Yet it’s Luigi’s tomato sauce (peeping out between the loosely arranged squares of mozzarella) that makes the pie a stunner, fresh and fantastic, bright and tangy like summertime, harboring big earthy chunks of garlic. 

Luigi’s menu is vastly more complex than Giuseppina’s, offering several different styles of pizza and sauce, as well as typical slice-joint fare like ziti, beef patties, and chicken rolls. For all I know, these other menu options may well be exemplary. But I’d rather work my way through every conceivable combination of their truly great pizza.