Yo Home Slice: The Massese at Eataly

The City Guide's debut pizza review hits up Mario Batali's Italian food emporium across the street from the Complex offices.

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Image via Complex Original
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For our inaugural Yo Home Slice, a new column highlighting local pizza spots from across the country (and the world!), we hit up Eataly, the Italian food market/restaurant that's a stone's 4-week-old ice ball's throw away from the Complex HQ on 23rd Street. Eataly's crowded, geared mostly toward tourists, pretentious as fuck (its pizza menu is titled—drumroll—"La Pizza"), and, all that notwithstanding, pretty cool. Sure, you can hit Downtown or Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn or even Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, and find plenty of authentic Italian butcheries and charcuteries, but if you're a real New Yorker, you've already succumbed to the Disneyfication of the town and are OK with doing your shopping at malls (at least that's what we tell ourselves).

But how's the pizza? In two words: not great. We went with the Massese (mozzarella and Neapolitan spicy salami) because it's the closest to an NYC pepperoni slice, and because we weren't going to start a pizza column with a slice that has zucchini on it. Not surprisingly, the salami was top notch, but the rest was just a run-of-the-mill, floppy-crust pie that you could find anywhere. Mozzarella, tomato sauce, and warm bread is hard to fuck up, and they don't by any means; but maybe we expected a little more. Although at $14 for a six-piece pie (they don't sell slices), it's not a terrible price for a pepperoni slice. But if you're in this neighborhood, it ain't no Maffei's.

Eataly
200 5th Ave.

Like pizza? Of course you do. Hit @JackEComplex to rep Yo Home Slice in your hometown.

 

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