Before we start - sorry for the consistently blurry and fuzzy pictures lately.  I had a relatively cheap point-and-shoot I was using for food pictures which recently died.  I’m buying something nice soon but for now I’m making due with the camera on my phone.  It looks horrible, I’m aware.  Onward!

From page 4 of Lanier and Herman’s Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic:

Buildings, like landscapes, are cultural artifacts.  Like other objects that are made or modified by humans, they are also, according to archeologist James Deetz, “fossilized ideas.”  The notion of the proper shape, size, and appearance of an object, whether it is a building or a baseball glove, exists in the mind of its creator.  When this idea is given tangible form, a material record of that idea, or an artifact, results.

Ok, so they should have said “pizza” when they said “baseball glove,” but close enough.  If cooking and eating can, indeed, take us back in time, then we have to use our foods as subjects, as artifacts, which is a big part of food blogging to begin with, I think.  Of course, there’s a problem when taking a quote from a book about architecture and applying it to food - buildings are things we can look at, things which often last for decades, centuries, millennia if they’re lucky.

Food on the other hand, we eat, and digest.  Even still, a lot still applies.  Even if actual food items usually don’t become “fossilized” across time, they can still represent what a creator considers proper, correct, ideal, desirable, and specifically tasty. Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, the original in New Haven, CT, is probably as famous as pizza places come, and certainly there’s a lot to be said for how specific, and idealized a pie from Pepe’s can be.

The crust is thin, a cooked over charcoal.  It’s charred, ideally.  In the case of Pepe’s white clam, the pizza I dream about when I dream about pizza, it’s loaded with chewy, salty clams, and bombed with enough garlic to kill an elephant.  On one hand, it’s the culinary equivalent of taking a wrecking ball to your taste buds, every bite exploding with clam juice, olive oil, garlic, and blackened, crispy bread.  It’s also completely balanced, nuanced, and subtle in the way the flavors are orchestrated and combined.  Every bite is different, some a little crunchier, some a little fishier, and some slowly soaking up all of the liquids into the crust.

Getting even more poetic, the white clam pizza is equally modern and ancient.  Bread is as old as the Neolithic, Egyptians used garlic as currency, and while I’m not familiar with the history of shellfish as food, I’d imagine we could trace the consumption of Mollusca through much of human history.  I’m imagining the benefits of eating them for our ancestors.  Clams can’t run away, and they don’t bite back or anything.  The modernity comes from the minimalism, and I don’t think it really gets much more minimal than a flatbread adorned with clams and garlic.

Alright, so enough philosophizing, the Manchester location isn’t as good as the New Haven original, but it’s close, and probably still the 2nd best pizza I’ve ever had.  The differences are subtle, but the main one, for me, is that the pies in Manchester seem a bit more civil, measured, even reverent.  Part of the appeal at the New Haven location is that it seems like the pizzas are literally slung together, with uneven sauce and cheese and toppings flung everywhere, like there is some sort of primal beast throwing them together in the kitchen.  Of course, the nice folks who make the pizzas at all of the locations are not beasts, they’re actually quite nice people but I wish the folks in Manchester would get just a touch more sloppy.

It’s a minor quibble for the best pizza I’ve ever had, and in Manchester they get awful close.  Just a few tips - go simple, not more than a couple toppings and get some Foxon Park sodas, in the big liter bottles.  You’ll have some left over to take home, but the pizza is good enough the soda is all you’ll be taking with you.
Frank Pepe

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