Posted by Adam Kuban, July 8, 2008 at 2:20 PM
From left, recent pizza-related Photograzing submissions from Bitchin' Camero and Nick Solares.
For years, Slice readers have been sending me snapshots of their slices or have emailed asking about ways to upload and share pix of their pizza. There was no easy way to do it.
Until now.
Serious Eats, which Slice has been a part of since 2007, just launched a new food-photo-sharing site last week called Photograzing. You may have missed it in the run up to the holiday weekend. No worries. Head on over and check it out.
Users can upload their food photos from their blogs, Flickr, or other photo-hosting site and share them with other Photograzing readers. So far, there haven't been enough pizza photos for my taste (could there ever be?), but I think you homeslices can fix that right?
Eventually our web mastermind is going to give me a way to promote great pizza photos from Photograzing onto Slice itself. But until then, why don't you prime the pump with some crusty, saucy, cheesy, beautiful pizza porn?
If you want to upload photos, note that your Slice/Serious Eats account will work on Photograzing. If you don't have an account, it's free and easy to grab one.
Hasta la pizza, folks!
Posted by Adam Kuban, July 7, 2008 at 10:00 AM
When we visited Toby's Public House last week, not only did we pick up on some great pizza, we also picked up a tip to pass on to you.
Nicola Bertolotti, who was brought in to school the other pie-makers at Toby's, will be opening his own place in Williamsburg in mid August.
The new pizzeria will be called Fornaccio, which Bertolotti told us means "old oven." The name derives from the fact that Bertolotti happened up an old house with a hundred-year-old oven that he's been restoring, along with the rest of the place.
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Posted by Daniel Zemans, July 5, 2008 at 5:00 PM
Daniel Zemans, our man in Chicago, checks in with another piece of intel on the Windy City pizza scene. Daniel also blogs about Chicagoland pizza with his friends on the Chicago Pizza Club blog. —The Mgmt.
Do you remember when the Chicago Bulls had a 1.7 percent chance of getting the first pick in the NBA Lottery and won? Sure you do—it was only a little over a month ago. And surely you remember when the Bulls drafted Derrick Rose last week while the Knicks took some dude from Italy. I don't know what Danilo Gallinari knows about pizza or whether he is the next Frederic Weis, but I do know that Derrick Rose is going to be a star and that he is a pizza connoisseur. The point guard of the future's favorite pizza is Home Run Inn, an institution on the southwest side of Chicago.
Home Run Inn opened as a bar in 1923. According to restaurant lore, the place got its name after a ball from a neighborhood baseball game flew through the front window (which was not open). For the next 24 years, the family-owned bar established itself as a neighborhood fixture, with Vincent Grittani serving the drinks and his wife Mary cooking up midday meals. In 1942, Nick Perrino married Loretta, the Grittani's daughter. In 1945, he returned from World War II and Vincent Grittani died. Two years later, Perrino and his mother-in-law decided to start giving away Mary's pizza for free in an effort to boost business. Needless to say, the idea worked. Today, the business, which is still family owned and run by Nick's son Joe, has eight locations and a booming frozen pizza business, all of which serve up pizzas made according to the family recipe introduced to the world in 1947.
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Posted by The Serious Eats Team, July 2, 2008 at 2:00 PM
As much as we’d like to, there are times during the day when can’t actually eat something delicious. At those moments, then, we have to resort to the next best thing—looking at delicious food.
Photograzing is a place to share your best food photography, discover new food blogs, and find tasty inspiration. Whether it’s ideas for tonight’s dinner, some eye candy to help you procrastinate, or just a lively connection to the community of food-lovers on the web, we hope you’ll find this new food photography site a staple of your online diet.
Learn more about Photograzing or go and start sharing your perfect pie photos!
Posted by Adam Kuban, July 2, 2008 at 12:41 PM
One of Jeff Varasano's homemade pizzas. "One of my best-tasting pies ever," he writes on Jeff Varasano's Famous New York Pizza Recipe.
When it rains, it pours. Jeff Varasano's hometown paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, runs a profile on him today. This, in addition to the one the New York Times ran as well.
The AJC's piece has further insight into Jeff's character, painting him as a bit of a wonky engineer and pizza visionary:
To understand the Varasano mind and its approach to problem solving, it helps to know a couple of things:
> One: At the age of 14, he set the U.S. Rubik's Cube record with a time of 24.67 seconds and then published "Jeff Conquers the Cube in 45 Seconds: And You Can Too!" This achievement was noted during an assembly of his freshman class at Yale.
> Two: He is prone to saying things like, "I can watch two ducks fight over a piece of bread and go home and apply that. I see connections that other people can't."
I've met Jeff, and he's not as geeky (in the traditional sense) as this profile would make him out to be. He is, however, pizza-obsessed—a true pizza geek.
I like that this profile has more info on Jeff's upcoming Atlanta pizzeria:
Investors have approached Varasano about setting him up in the pizza business, but he and Stokley are planning on going it alone when they open this fall in the new Mezzo Atlanta building on Peachtree. Disagreements with partners, he claims, doomed his software business.
Isn't he nervous about the pressure of running and cooking in a restaurant?
"No," Varasano says. "Once I learn the brick oven, it won't be too different from what I do here."
Our own Ed Levine is quoted in the story, too, calling Jeff's voluminous pizza page the War and Peace of pizza blog posts."
Posted by Adam Kuban, July 2, 2008 at 1:48 AM
How cool is this? In September 2006, Jeff Varasano's Pizza Page blew up like mad when Boing Boing and all the other biggies linked to it. You see, Varasano announced on his page that he was finally satisfied with his at-home Patsy's clone. Well, the New York Times finally noticed—took 'em two years—and runs a great profile on Jeff. It's full of charming anecdotes about his travails while cooking with an oven modified to bake pizza during the self-clean cycle:
In the steel floor of the lower oven, there is a jagged, dime-size hole, made when an errant piece of superheated topping melted through. One window pane in that oven’s door is shattered, destroyed after a drop of sauce fell onto it at high heat. There is a long list of wrecked equipment — two more oven windows, three mixers and food processors, one internal fan. The oven has been shorting fuses lately. It’s getting harder, Mr. Varasano said, to make up stories for the oven repair guys.
The story also mentions that Varasano is thinking of opening his own pizzeria in Atlanta, where he now lives, this fall.
Posted by Adam Kuban, July 1, 2008 at 3:37 PM
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So I just made a case for getting my greasy hands on a free developer iPhone 3G from Apple. One of my points was that Slice could help improve the device's pizza logic. I thought the thing only needed minor tweaking.
Turns out, it needs a lot of help. As Aaron Landry points out, the separate video that really gets down to the nitty gritty on the Maps with GPS feature shows Bob the iPhone Guy starting out in Brooklyn Heights. On Pineapple and Henry streets. He searches for pizza, and the iPhone defaults to John's Pizzeria in Times Square. Peep the map above. That's like 7.4 miles away.
And as Landry says, Bob passes a number of great pizzerias along the way. Check out Landry's insightful post about it. It's great stuff.
See, Apple, this is why you should GIVE ME AN IPHONE. So Slice can help you work out these bugs. Bob's demo video, after the jump.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, July 1, 2008 at 2:00 PM
Yeah, you already know that you can use an iPhone to look up all manner of stuff via the Google Maps feature, but with the new 3G iPhone coming out July 11, GPS is added into the mix. I was poking around on the Apple site last week and noticed that the GPS feature page featured an iPhone trained on the location of John's Pizzeria in Times Square. And in the latest video tour, the gesticulating iPhone Guy looks up P-I-Z-Z-A in Manhattan and clicks on John's. (Video, after the jump.)
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