A Pizza Grows in Brooklyn

Context: this post is about the third day of my New York City trip, which was our second day in the city.

Our second day in New York City was a Friday. And on that Friday, we did three main things.

We ate dinner at Pret a Manger, which was okay. It's one of those places where you grab cold wraps, sandwiches, and salads off refrigerated shelves. I'm more of a hot food person myself, as my parents can attest. They always hated it when I heated up their house by using the oven or making thick soup for dinner on a hot summer's day. So Pret a Manger was not my thing, and it also didn't really fill me up.

After dinner, we went to A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, which was fun. This musical won Best Musical in the 2014 Tony Awards, and let me tell you--it deserved it. It was well-written and well-presented. The premise is that a distant relation of an earl starts killing off his relatives so that he will become the next earl. I expected this show to get dark quickly, a la Jekyll and Hyde, but incredibly it stayed light and hilarious the whole time. More incredibly, the murderer remained a sympathetic character throughout the show. However, should you be interested in seeing this show, know that there were some inappropriate jokes and one terribly inappropriate song.

But. Before we ate at Pret a Manger or attended A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, we experienced the best part of our day, otherwise known as A Slice of Brooklyn Pizza Tour.

This tour, this tour--where do I start when telling you about this tour? At the beginning, I suppose. Well, in the beginning, when we were planning the trip, one of Glory's stipulations was that she wanted to go on a bus tour and be typical tourists. In her wisdom, Older Sister decided that the best bus tour would be a pizza bus tour. And thus she reserved us places on A Slice of Brooklyn Pizza Tour.

Glory was excited for the chance to be bus tourists on a tour bus. While we were looking around Times Square the day before, she insisted that we all buy I <3 NY shirts to wear the next day on the bus tour so that everyone knew we were tourists. She also produced a pair of pink pajama pants covered with miniature I <3 NY designs to wear with her shirt to be even more touristy.

You may be confused as to why this excited Glory so. Well, in her senior year of high school, all of Glory's girl friends asked someone to the school Halloween dance. When Glory couldn't find anyone, she decided to go to the dance stag, dressed as a blade of grass.

Either this story will help you understand Glory more, or it will just confuse you. But if you're confused, you're not alone.

On Friday morning, we all put on our I <3 NY shirts to placate Glory. Glory added her pajama pants. Older Sister and I added cardigans over our shirts, which we pulled shut while on the subway. Being dressed as tourists on the bus tour was all very well, but it seemed best not to do it on the subway.

By this point, we were beginning to understand the ease of the subway. Yes, our passes continued to be plagued with issues, but the actual subway was quite simple to use. If we were on 42nd street and wanted to go to any street with a higher number, we got on the subway heading uptown. If we wanted to go to a street with a lower number, we got on the subway heading downtown. Easy, no?

In this case, we went downtown to 14th Street and Union Square. Union Square was lovely--there was a little farmer's market, a park with a statue that was probably Mahatma Gandhi but which looked like an airbender, and some fun shops nearby.

We didn't spend a lot of time there, though, because we had to meet up with our tour guide. And as lovely as Union Square was, once we met our tour guide everything became 10,000,000 times better.

"Hey, how you doin'?" she asked us once we were all on the bus.

"Good," everyone on the bus chorused back.

She told us that in Brooklyn, if someone says, "How you doin'?" you say, "How you doin'?" back. Then she told us to "fuhgettaboud" the rest of the city, because she was going to show us Brooklyn and its pizza.

Her name was Paula. She said that she was half Jewish, half Italian Roman Catholic, and that she grew up in the same apartment building as both sets of her grandparents. She had an amazing Brooklyn accent, made casual references to her cousin Tony, and threw Yiddish phrases around like it was no big deal. I don't know if she exaggerated her Brooklyn-ness for the sake of the tour or if she acted like this naturally, but we loved it. I would have gladly donned a t-shirt that instead said I <3 Paula. Or maybe even I <3 Brooklyn, because her obvious enthusiasm and love for her borough were rubbing off on me.

Speaking of the I <3 NY shirts, everyone on our tour kept saying that our matching outfits were cute. So, apparently, did Paula, who kept calling us the "cute Utah girls," and saying we all had amazing hair. She told Glory that she'd been to one city in Utah before, but that she got a much more positive impression of the state from us than she had from the people she met while she was there.

Paula took us to a perfect photo op spot looking over the harbor. She took us to Coney Island and to places in Brooklyn where movies were filmed. She showed us the houses of wealthy people in the upscale neighborhoods, telling us that she'd knocked on the owners' doors to find out more about their houses for her tour. She shared local gossip and stories about the mafia with us. And, then, of course, she took us for pizza.

Included in the price of the tour were four slices of pizza and two drinks each. First, we went to Grimaldi's for famous coal-fire margherita pizza.

All that was on this thin-crusted pizza was tomato sauce, basil, and some "fresh mozzarell," as Paula called it. "That's it," she said. She said that pizza doesn't need anything else on it, and she was right. All my two slices needed was a bottle of root beer to wash them down.

Then we went to L&B Spumoni Gardens, where we had a thicker-crust, Sicilian-style, square pizza. This pizza had the mozzarella cheese underneath the sauce and a second kind of cheese on top. If possible, this pizza was even better than Grimaldi's. There were little dishes of Parmesan on the tables to sprinkle over your pizza and an ice cream parlor that sold spumni. I ate gelato every day when I was in Europe a few years ago. I've been crazy about it ever since, but I'd never tried spumoni, a different type of Italian ice cream. So I bought a cup of rainbow (chocolate, vanilla, and pistachio) spumoni to try. I was glad I did.

After our amazing tour, we were all full, which is why we ended up at Pret a Manger for a light (too light, for me) dinner instead of eating somewhere else. And then we went to A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder etcetera, etcetera; you know the rest.

But for the rest of the trip, we kept talking about that tour and, unabashedly, would try to imitate Paula's amazing accent. Little Sister and I did it a few nights later with the condiments at the dinner table:

LITTLE SISTER: Do you want salt in ya watah?

AWKWARD MORMON: No, I don't want salt in my watah!

LITTLE SISTER: Do you want peppah in ya watah?

AWKWARD MORMON: No, I don't want peppah in my watah!

LITTLE SISTER: Do you want red peppah in ya watah?

AWKWARD MORMON: No, I don't want red peppah in my watah!

I guess it doesn't take t-shirts to make us look like tourists.