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A few Sundays ago, my pal Mark and I had one of those long, traipsing-about New York weekend days that started in Williamsburg, at Pies ‘n’ Thighs, and ended back in our neighborhood at Sosta, a new Italian place on Atlantic.  The biscuits and gravy at Pies ‘n’ Thighs, we decided, are hands down the best in the city (though they did come out a touch less hot than they should’ve); skip the lackluster huevos rancheros.  After brunch, there was a trip into town to the International Center for Photography, where there are two really wonderful exhibits currently on display: The Mexican Suitcase, which features previously unseen photos from the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Shim, and Gerda Taro; and Cuba in Revolution, which showcases Cuba political and daily life from the Batista regime through the July 26th Movement and Castro’s rise to power.  (There’s an amazing photograph of Castro playing golf that needs to be seen to be believed.)

From there it was downtown into Soho for some shopping, then afternoon green tea at Teany, and finally back into Brooklyn, where we tried the pizzas at Sosta.  They’ve got pretty decent Neapolitan pies, with good toppings and a solid sauce with nice tang, though the crust could be a bit saltier and the dough a touch less chewy.  But it’s a good addition to a neighborhood that doesn’t really have very many neighborhood pizza joints. (I’m not counting Lucali, since a neighborhood spot shouldn’t involve a two-hour wait.)  Afterwards we checked out the new Barney’s Co-op on Atlantic, to marvel at the prices (there goes the neighborhood, my friends!). 

But the day also marked one of my last days with the borrowed Leica and the Summicron lens.  I’d convinced myself since then that I didn’t need such a lovely machine, and that my cameras and their accompanying glass would suffice just fine.  Then I got these photos back and dear me!, I nearly started weeping.  The crispness and clarity of the images is just …. wow.    And sigh.  And would someone like to donate $3k to my Leica fund?

(Addendum: The photos above — well, all the photos on this blog — get compressed a bit funny on WordPress, such that the image quality is not as high as it ought to be.  If you’d like to be properly wowed by Leica glass, go to my flickr pictures here.)

Sometimes you go to a restaurant and you want it to be amazing.  Well, I’m assuming that we’d all like the food we eat to be completely sublime, even if it’s just the dumpling place down the street from the local, or Punjabi, just downstairs from where I used to live.  And sometimes the cheap eats let us down, but at least they fill us up.  Sometimes $2 for a warmed up samosa smothered in chana masala, yogurt, and hot sauce is all you need. 

But other times you pay that little extra with the expectations of being wowed.  Or at least find yourself mmmm’ing and nodding your head and thinking man, this is really lovely.  Please give me more of this food.  Now.  I may not dream about this food tomorrow or next week, but right now, oh yes oh yes.  I come across many of those spots, where the ambiance is nice, I can hear myself think (usually), I like what I’m eating, and the price is reasonable, less than a fancy meal but more than my local delivery spot.   These places are a-ok. 

And then there’s Kin Shop, Harold Dieterle’s new Thai place on Sixth Avenue down in the Village.  Man, I really wanted to like Kin Shop.  Serious Eats loved Kin Shop.  I don’t always agree with their reviews, but when a reputable food website says that this is some of the best Thai food outside of Thailand, and the best Thai in NYC, well, it’d better be pretty close.  And …. it wasn’t.   I mean, it wasn’t bad, and I guess it was more than solid.  But it just didn’t move me.  And on a Friday night after a long week, I really wanted to be moved. 

Eddie and I agreed that everything tasted fine, but none of the dishes came together as a whole.  There was always one slightly off-note in each dish that made it hard to fully enjoy what was at hand.  Duck laab salad was fiery and tasty, but you couldn’t really tell that it was duck, and sweet jesus, it was spicier than it needed to be (and we both like our spicy food quite a bit).  Bone marrow came with something sort of creamy, maybe mayo?, that threw me off a bit.  The fried pork and fried oyster salad needed one extra thing to bind it together — each ingredient tasted great on its own, but together the flavors were somewhat hollow, as if the integration of flavors worked to cancel out any flavor.

The curries: The red curry with duck came out as a plate of sliced duck meat with a little pitcher of red curry that you could pour atop the meat.  Tasted fine, but when I want a curry, I really do want a big mess of curry that I can sop up with bread or rice (and, to be sure, the roti that came with our duck was pretty great).  Massaman curry with goat was probably my favorite (though Eddie didn’t like it nearly as much as I did).  Incredibly tender braised goat meat, falling off the bone.   Though the curry had a nice depth of flavor, it still needed a little something; it wasn’t quite melding with the goat the way I’d like.

So … yeah.  We didn’t love it.  But the nice thing about sharing a meal, however disappointing, is that you’re sharing a meal.  Eddie and I, though longtime pals via the local, hadn’t ever gone out one on one before.  (There was a spectacular afternoon of multiperson dim sum and wine and fake angulas not long ago, but that’s another story entirely.)  And it was absolutely lovely!  Twas quite nice to talk about non-local matters, make plans for future fooding, and to laugh throughout the meal at our pre-dinner celebrity sighting: none other than Elvis Costello, looking so much like Elvis Costello that we thought there was no way it could be him.  The hat, the glasses, the scarf — everything.  Our hostess told us that he’d just finished eating at the restaurant when we ran into him outside on the sidewalk, talking on his cellphone.  I wonder if he was telling his wife about how sometimes, you just want a restaurant to be amazing.

Top: Naked biscuits.  Above: Begravied biscuits.  In both: huevos rancheros demolition at Lobo, over on Court Street.  Sometimes all you need is a reliable brunch option nearby.  And a lovely walk to said reliable brunch option, with autumn in full swing.

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No, this isn’t the best pizza in New York.  But it comes pretty close — and really, if you’re gonna call yourself Best Pizza, you need to come pretty close at the very least.

I’d been to the Best Pizza space about two years ago, with my friend Rose Ellen, back when the space was Brooklyn Star and they were serving pretty great Southern-inspired fare.  Then there was a fire that pretty much gutted the space, and while Brooklyn Star has promised to return in a new location, the owners, along with the Roberta’s Pizza folks, have teamed up to open Best Pizza.  (Were they trying to come up with the most un-Googlable restaurant name ever?)  Adam Kuban over at Slice has a much more comprehensive review of the place, as does Donny Tsang at Eat to Blog (Donny was actually my dining companion for this excursion, and I think you can see his camera/hand in a couple of the shots), so I’ll not bore you with the technical details of the oven or pies, except that the slices we got were pretty extraordinary.  The plain slices were a nice combination of the thin crust Neapolitan pies you see around the city now, but had the crispy–chewy feel of a classic New York slice.  The tomato sauce on the plain slice was tangy and bright, and the cheese was applied consistently but not overwhelmingly.  The grandma slice was a revelation — Slice mentions that they add some ground anchovies to the sauce in the grandma pie, and there’s such a great umami taste throughout that really elevated the slice to another category altogether.  And the grandma crust!  Wowzers.  A bit denser than the crust on the plain slice, but certainly not crunchy or too chewy.  There’s also a white pie, which I liked despite my general aversion to non-sauced pies — the caramelized onions that come on top were pretty great, I have to admit.

Which is all to say: go.  Go now.  They sell pies whole and by the slice, and the place is on Havemeyer between North 7th and 8th, so a little bit off the beaten path (read: not as burdened with Williamsburg foot traffic), and opens at two pm every day.  These are currently my favorite slices in New York — for reals — and though I don’t often plot out trips to Williamsburg*, much less for a slice of pizza in Williamsburg, I’m considering making my way on the G Train this coming weekend for some pretty craveworthy pie.  Man, I wish they delivered to my part of town.

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* I actually went today to the new location of Pies ‘n’ Thighs on Driggs and s.4th, and sweet jesus, their biscuits and gravy — plus the promise of near-perfect pie at Best Pizza — is making me rethink my recent aversion to Williamsburg eats.   (And yes, I used to live in Williamsburg.  Stop pointing out my internal/obvious contradictions.)

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