Expatriate New Yorker Clones Patsy's Pizza
The ability to appreciate fine pizza — or the ability to reject utter shit pizza — is pretty much inversely proportionate to alcohol intake. So, if one plans on visiting any of New York's temples of fine pies, such as Patsy's or Lombardi's, one had best make it the first stop of the evening. Otherwise, you end up hitting a Ray's at 3 a.m., telling the counterman not to even bother heating up whatever scabrous nastiness they've got left. You just need something to soak up the booze. There's a whole other level of exalted pizza appreciation in the person of Jeff Varasano, who spent years (years!) trying to clone the recipe for Patsy's pizza after he left New York. Just how much of a super-nerd is Jeff? In addition to precise equipment, exacting technique, and obsessive measuring of flour and yeast, there's also spreadsheet involved. And many of Jeff's pizza experimentation photos take on the clinical air of a dissection (or autopsy). We're pretty sure the Italians (or more likely Ecuadorians) actually making the pies at Patsy's are not Excel-proficient.
UPDATE: A crush of traffic from Fark, Boing Boing, and, probably, us has forced Varasano to take down his pizza compendium from his company site. However, an August 22 version still lives on in Google's cache.
