Scott's Pizza Tour Pizza News

You’re lost. You’re hungry. You need pizza. You have a wi-fi equipped mobile device. You are saved! Everybody knows about general food-locating apps like Yelp, Foursquare and Foodspotting but there are several apps dedicated solely to helping you find nearby pizzerias. Here’s a quick rundown of four of them.

NAME: Pizza Finder
PRICE: FREE (you just have to deal with the ad at the bottom)
TERRITORY: Entire USA
DEVICES: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad

Pizza Finder opens with a list of pizzerias in close proximity. You get exact distance, address and phone number right there on the main page. Clicking through to any pizzeria gives you its Yelp page for more details and reviews. You can even enter any location in the US and get a list of pizzerias if you want to plan ahead rather than wait until you’re standing sliceless at an unfamiliar intersection. It’s pretty much just a “pizza” search in the Yellow Pages.

Not a bad app if you’re in a new apartment and want to order a couple pies for all the friends you roped into helping you move, but keep in mind you’re depending on Yelp reviews to light the way to the right spot. Choose the wrong pizzeria and you’ll have to find new friends for the next move.

Get Pizza Finder at the App Store

NAME: Cheazza
PRICE: $0.99
TERRITORY: NYC
DEVICES: Compatible with iPad, iTouch and iPhone

As its name (sort of) indicates, Cheazza is all about helping you find cheap pizza. It lists chains, dollar slice shops and pizza deals by neighborhood or via a geo-location feature. In the screenshot above, you’ll see Papa John’s (#3 chain in the US), 2 Bros. Pizza (dollar slice chain around NYC), Crocodile Lounge (one of several NYC bars that offer a free personal pizza with every drink) and a couple other dollar slice joints. Come to think of it, Cheazza is technically an app that lists pizzerias you’ll want to avoid! It amazes me that anyone New York would go out of their way to find a bad slice, but I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures. Use at your own risk!

Get Cheazza at the App Store

NAME: Jeff Orlick’s Real Pizza of New York
PRICE: $2.99
TERRITORY: New York Metro Area
DEVICES: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad

Who is Jeff Orlick? He’s a guy who lives in Queens and really likes good food. He’s constantly searching for authenticity, honesty and general realness in eateries of all sorts but this app concentrates specifically on Jeff’s personal pizza recommendations. Instead of searching based on proximity, Real Pizza suggests pizzerias based on user-selected filters (right screenshot above) such as borough, oven type and pizza style. There are also options to sort by price and neighborhood if you don’t want to go with straight alphabetical order.

This is easily my favorite pizza-finding app because it features something none of the other ones have: curation. Orlick has clearly spent countless hours, days, months, years culling his list and it is constantly being revised and expanded. His app shows you photos he took and reviews he wrote with extra info you can’t get from a simple phone book listing.

Real Pizza’s only real downfall is that there’s so much information that the app tends to run a bit slow and the navigation is a bit clunky. I also wish it had a geo-location function but my fingers are crossed that’s coming with the next update. That being said, this is the only app for serious pizza enthusiasts and it’s well worth the price of admission. (Full disclosure: My tour is listed on the app, but I’d dig it even if it wasn’t.)

Get Real Pizza of New York at the App Store

NAME: Pizza Compass
PRICE: $0.99
TERRITORY: Earth
DEVICES: Compatible with iPhone 3GS and later, iPod touch 3rd generation and later, iPad running iOS 6.0 or later

This one just came out and its release gave me an excuse to finally review the pizza apps that have been sitting on my phone for the past few years. It is without a doubt the most attractive and user-friendly of all selections in this post but at the same time one of the most basic.

The Pizza Compass website is brilliant in its simplicity. It has links to just a few of the massive number of press pieces written when the app dropped as well as a simple video of the app’s “creator” Zeus Gorham Munkist (he’s not listed as a copyright holder) giving a spiel about the app. I was really taken in by the video because it lays out that the app is simply for finding the closest pizzeria and not interested in cultivating an elite list of authentic options. In that sense, it’s a lot like Pizza Finder (and the many other location apps I chose not to include since they’re all the same) but Pizza Compass actually looks like a compass as it points you toward slice salvation. It has smart features like a smoke indicator to let you know when you’re getting close and a red-green bar that tells you whether or not the place is currently open. It’s a really clean design, perfect for helping you find those late-night (READ AS: drunk) desperation slices.

But is it the greatest app ever? Will it change your life? Is it a “tool…to help us celebrate life…love…adventure,” as the video claims? No. No. Maybe. Because sometimes pizza isn’t about historic coal ovens or 48 hour fermentation or mozzarella di bufala; it’s about the comfort of a warm slice without having walked very far.

Get Pizza Compass at the App Store

Zeus Gorham Munkis, Pizza-Compass.com

Super jazzed about new Pizza Journals for pizza tour goody bags aka Pizza Tour Survival Kits! They’re printed by Scout Books in Portland, OR and I’m extremely excited to start packing them for tours in early June. 

It’s extremely important to have a pizza journal for note taking and keeping track of one’s personal pizza reflections during the tour because everyone has their own opinion and it’s rare the crew reaches a consensus after visiting 3-4 pizzerias. It’s also handy for non-pizza writing, if such things should ever become important enough to record.

Everyone who takes a tour with me gets one of these bad boys plus some palate cleansers and pizza candies!!!! PIZZA CANDIES!!!

My brother sent me a card to commemorate the 5th anniversary of Scott’s Pizza Tours. It’s amazing. And accurate.

DIY Pizza Pie is the greatest home pizza making tool since the advent of the pizza stone. No less should be expected of Mark Bello, the big cheese at Pizza A Casa in NYC’s Lower East Side. PAC’s pizza making workshops have become legendary for their ability to transform the dough-phobic into master pizzaioli in a matter of hours using a treasure trove of tricks and hacks developed over Bello’s years of tortured existence in the land of the deep dish. His methods are extremely simple and yield incredible results. The DIY Pizza Pie app distills the juiciest moments of a Pizza A Casa pizza making workshop into an easy-to-use app that’s perfect for beginners or pizza pros.

The app opens with a menu of selections ranging from necessary pizza gear (Tools of the Trade) to common mistakes (7 Deadly Pizza Pitfalls) to necessary dissertations on sauce, cheese and dough. Each of these categories gets you to a far more detailed list of options, such as this step-by-step process for making a Pizza Margherita.

Bello keeps it simple, but there are special features on nearly every page that will take you even deeper into pizza madness with incredibly detailed videos. These aren’t your ordinary cooking show variety where you see five seconds of work and the thing is magically done. One video demonstrates how to repair a punctured dough skin by using a light box to illustrate thin sections. Another shows two simultaneous angles of a dough stretching technique that would be difficult to describe in text alone or with a single video shot. It’s brilliant in its deep understanding of what processes concern most home pizza chefs, a skill the crew at Pizza A Casa developed by instructing thousands of people in the ways of the DIY pie.

For those who have taken the class, DIY Pizza Pie is a perfect way to take Bello and his bag of tricks with you. For those who aren’t planning a trip to New York anytime soon, it’s a valuable tool for attaining independence from low-quality take-out pizza wherever you live.

DIY Pizza Pie is currently available for iPad at the App Store. Live-action public workshops run weekends from noon to 4PM at Pizza A Casa in NYC’s Lower East Side.

A new phone book arrived on my stoop and it reveals amazing insight into the state of pizza in Brooklyn. Here are some stats:

- The book lists 518 phone numbers for pizzerias
- There are 19 listings for Domino’s Pizza
- There are 14 listings for Papa John’s plus a location at 3528 Nostrand Ave that’s spelled “Pappa John’s” for some reason (it’s a Papa John’s)
- There are 5 listings for Little Caesar’s
- No Pizza Huts are listed
- Popular pizzeria names include Sal’s (4), Vinny’s (4 + 1 Vinnie’s), Luigi’s (5), Rocco’s (6), Gino’s (6 + 1 Gina’s) but the most popular is Tony’s (13)
- There are no Ray’s pizzerias but 2 Not Ray’s listings remain
- Remove all duplicate listings and the Big Four chains and you’re left with 449 pizzerias in Brooklyn!

I usually cringe when TV shows do segments about pizza. They all go to the same places and describe food the same boring way with no insight into the real interesting stuff aside from a quick line about oven temperature here and mention of fresh ingredients there. This is not true for Cooking Channel’s new show Pizza Cuz, featuring Francis and Sal of NYC’s Artichoke Basille’s.

The show drops pizza into the standard format of 3 restaurant visits over the course of a 22 minute show. Francis and Sal have lots of experience working at their family’s restaurant in Staten Island, three pizzerias and two sandwich shops in Manhattan, all of which helps them translate the tastes and techniques they encounter at the pizzerias they visit. Other shows have such lame hosts who know nothing and freak out over everything they see happening in the kitchen but these guys are legit and their analysis is the perfect translation for armchair pizza tourists.

Francis and Sal are clearly guys who like to eat and it shows by their reactions to each slice. I actually got hungrier with every bite they took! It’s not the tired old “this is the greatest thing I’ve ever eaten” reaction. What a relief.

Pizza Cuz is scheduled to run for six episodes but if the remaining five are anything like the premier I really hope they get picked up for more.

WATCH THE PREMIER of PIZZA CUZ

Ever make an English muffin pizza? Check this Thomas’ ad from 1979 for proof you didn’t invent it.

Ever wanted to watch a machine make pizza boxes? You’re welcome.

Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pizza ads I found at the New York Public Library Image Archive! Notice the increase in cheese from the 1956s to the 1960s. German pizza from 1973 is a whole other story.

Gennaro Lombardi and Anthony Pero (Totonno) stand in front of 53 Spring Street in 1905.

Today is the 118th anniversary of Gennaro Lombardi’s arrival in America. Just 20 years old at the time, Lombardi arrived at Ellis Island aboard a ship called Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelm after departing from the port of Naples, Italy. He ended up on Spring Street, where most of his family worked as tailors. Lombardi took a job at a grocery/bakery on Spring Street, of which he took ownership in 1905 and converted into the nation’s first pizzeria. 

At the time, pizza was only being sold in bakeries as a side item but Lombardi’s was the first to make it the focus of a restaurant. Several of New York’s most storied pizzerias were founded by former employees of Lombardi’s, such as the recently reopened Totonno’s on Coney Island (1924) and John’s on Bleecker Street (1929).