Eating Through New York’s Pizza Joints
Pizza Sampling
Hagendorf has spent the last two and a half years sampling cheese pizza slices from each and every shop he can find in Manhattan. As November came to a close, so did his quest. He finished off his pizza tour with a slice at Da Vinci Pizza at the southern tip of Manhattan.
Hagendorf’s pizza quest began, ironically, in Colorado when he ate a terrible slice of pizza at a store called NYPD in Colorado Springs. They claimed to serve New York pizza, and he couldn’t stop talking about how awful it was upon his return to New York. He and the friend “joked about me becoming a pizza consultant” and, as they say, the rest is history.
Blogging Away
Ironically, Hagendorf explains that the hardship he encountered during his journey wasn’t in the pizza eating, but in the blogging. As he said,
“I still love eating pizza, but I just got sick of writing about pizza. There is only so much you can say about pizza. Eventually it became a game to me to try and find the strangest or most elaborately precise means to describe a slice.”
A Freddy Krueger
Along the way, Hagendorf coined a new term. Once, while eating a burnt piece of pizza, he wrote that it “looked like Freddy Krueger’s face” and from then on, any burnt piece of pizza was simply described as “a real Freddy Krueger.”
Hagendorf’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. He’s been asked if he wants to be on a reality tv show, he’s received calls from Google and from various book companies. Hagendorf is quick to point out, however, that he didn’t start this journey to make money. As he said, this is
“what is so appealing for most New Yorkers. Nobody is paying me to do this. It is all very guileless and quite clear that I did not start this with the intention of being famous and making money.”
Today, as he winds down his pizza tour, the Brooklyn resident sits down to two slices of cheese and pepperoni pizza at his favorite locale — Carmine’s Original in Greenpoint. It’s good to be back to enjoying pizza without blogging about it.
