STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 6 June 2013

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32. MYSTIC PIZZA {calling out my food peeps}

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/miracle-pizza.html



I have never thrown a dinner party without experiencing at least one moment of knee-knocking, might-as-well-blow-up-the-brisket panic. Once, when a risotto took on the consistency of nearly dry cement, I lay down on the floor and refused to get up. I’ve stormed out of the house, leaving the oven on and the burners aflame. I’ve cried to my butcher, my fish guy, and an assortment of alarmed grocery-store employees. I’ve realized at 8 P.M. that my guests would not be eating before midnight, and, on one particularly dramatic occasion, a chicken left my apartment via the window. Somehow, when friends arrive memories of these ordeals vanish; everyone drinks, laughs, and polishes off the replacement chicken, its ill-fated predecessor forgotten. Yet, when the time comes to ready the next meal, P.T.S.D. flashbacks blaze up—frozen pork chops! sunken soufflé! smoking oven!—and I set about arming myself against the next unknowable disaster.

In that spirit, before I recently began preparing a dinner from the new “Franny’s Simple Seasonal Italian Cookbook” I read the recipes all the way through, learning that I could not begin the pizza dough the day of cooking—it rises in the fridge for forty-eight hours and must be reshaped, re-cooled, then warmed up in order to take on crust-like qualities. I started shopping for ingredients at ten-thirty in the morning, giving myself time to loiter and chat up my baker, butcher, and ice-cream purveyor. I set the table around noon to head off any zero-hour revelation that I had lost all of my forks. By four, the toppings and salads were prepped, the pizza stone was heated, I’d showered, and my roommate (babysitter for the day) decided it was safe to leave me alone for long enough to go on a run.

When she returned, I was sitting at the kitchen table, waging war against the cork in a bottle of Prosecco, moaning, “Everything is ruined!” In this case, a few guests had dropped out—no big deal, six pizzas for seven people turned out to be only a little crazy—and I was quickly talked down. And yet Alice Waters’s avowal, in her glowing introduction to the husband and wife Andrew Feinberg and Francine Stephens’s book, that, “as you thumb through these pages, you start to absorb the easy grace with which meals are assembled at Franny’s,” did not seem entirely accurate.

“I believe there is no better pizza in all of New York,” Alice Waters writes of the pies at Feinberg and Stephens’s beloved (read: impossible to get a seat at) Brooklyn restaurant, which recently moved from one Flatbush Avenue location to another. (The old space will house the couple’s second eatery, Marco’s, which rumor has it will be a more of a classic Italian trattoria.) Franny’s was one of the early Brooklyn adopters of the environmentally responsible cuisine that Waters has long championed out West. And the restaurant’s popularity has persisted even as farm-to-table fare has become de rigueur across the borough, because the food is just that good. The vibe is convivial and casual—parents soothe grumpy toddlers with spoonfuls of stunning fior-di-latte gelato; more senior parents cheer as their teen-agers abstain from another slice of pizza in favor of a helping of one of Franny’s perfect, pared-down vegetable dishes (say, sugar snap peas with yogurt, scallions, and herbs). But Waters is right: Franny’s pizza that is so impeccable that even the home-cooked version—made on a pizza stone in a five-hundred-degree oven rather than in a nine-hundred-degree, wood-burning pizza oven—proved well worth the inevitable freak-out.