Meat Slice
– NY Pie –
$5.25 a slice| January 2023
If you Google “personal pan pizza” and then “personal-pan pizza,” with the hyphen, you get almost the exact same number of results for each (a bit more than 200,000). I haven’t been to a Pizza Hut since the ’90s, and it’s not like Pizza Hut is top-of-mind anywhere these days, given there’s been a proliferation of pizza at all levels of sophistication since it invented (invented?) the Personal Pan Pizza around 1983. If it still existed, the Personal Pan Pizza more or less wouldn’t exist. But back to punctuation …
With the hyphen, the emphasis is placed on the compound modifier “personal-pan,” referring to the size of the pizza as that of a pan that could, would and should be eaten by only one person.
Without the hyphen, you’re on your own to realize that a “pan pizza” has a considerably raised crust around the outside, much higher than that of a pizza made on a stone or directly on the flat, non-grated shelf of a pizza oven. Once you get that far, the word “personal” would then connote something made in a pan yet still individual to you.
This then leads me to ponder how a pizza becomes something unique to you and you alone. Crust is not crust is not crust, but it kinda is. You can take out a ruler, I suppose, and measure the height of a crust in sixteenths of an inch, then claim there are at least 16 different crusts, probably more. Eh. That’s silly. You basically have cracker-thin crusts (the dear departed Lento’s of Brooklyn), thin crusts, the classic medium crusts (this is the still-pretty-thin thickness if the menu doesn’t define the height of the crust at all), and seriously thicker versions.
Tomato sauce may or may not have real tomatoes still swimming within it, and of course it can be seasoned various ways, with dried green things and minutely ground powdery substances, but across the pizza world, there aren’t going to be thaaaat many variations of (tomato) sauce available. It’s not like fingerprints.
Finally, of course, there’s the cheese. You have your typical New York pizzeria shredded mozzarella, just slightly off-white, or is it off-yellow?; the kind the chains use, which I can’t speak to; and fresh, which comes in rounds as white as milk that don’t cover the entire pie. Maybe there’s an upgrade in the shredded depending on the supplier. Maybe.
Heat source? Wood stove, gas stove, coal, I dare you to blindingly sample 10 different pizzas at a neutral off-site location and correctly identify which ones came from which heat source.
So to personalize a pizza, we’re really talking toppings, aren’t we? There are a LOT of things you can put on a pizza, singly, to make it your own. You can also put multiple foodstuffs on there, two, three, four, five, six, the possibilities as endless as, well, the number π.
Pepperoni — we all know this — is a really popular topping, the most popular if you do a search on “most popular pizza toppings.” Me? No thanks. Can I stand it? Yeah yeah. Will I pick the pepperoni pieces off the slice? Yeah yeah.
Is there any exception to this, any slice of pizza whose pepperoni I would willingly eat? Yes, there is. The “meat slice” at NY Pie, located in the West Nashville shopping center. Why? Because the meat slice does not stop at pepperoni. In fact, the amount of pepperoni is reduced, its prominence diluted, by five other kinds of widowmaker-inducing meat: sausage, ham, bacon, salami and ground beef (note: the latter is not a euphemism for crushed-up meatballs, which is a separate topping altogether).
Why, you ask, did I italicize bacon? Have you ever had bacon on a pizza? Why would one ever not have bacon on a pizza? I digress; I can’t tell you exactly how the alchemy works, but together, those six artery-clogging morsels of magnificence are transforming. It’s a zing thing, not a quality thing; NY Pie isn’t City House, and the bacon isn’t pork belly. Pretty much the same level of ingredients that you could find at any decent facsimile of a New York slice joint. Maybe you want all-pepperoni all the time, but for my personal tastes, a pizza punctuated by these six ingredients, not spread around but climbing over each other, works fantastically well. And no need for a pan.