Posted on 07/02/2008 2:04:16 PM PDT by John Jorsett
The guests file into Jeff Varasano's Buckhead home with bottles of wine, and he greets them warmly. Mostly, they're first-timers.
"I've only met three of these people," says Varasano's partner, Heather Stokley, surveying the nearly two dozen eager souls who have scored an invitation to the evening's pizza tasting. "They're friends of friends, Internet friends. There's such a big list of people who want to come."
Over the past two years, Varasano pizza supplicants from across the city, the state and the country have beaten a path to his oven door. Some out-of-towners have spent the night in his guest room. According to Varasano, the former CEO of a well-known pizza chain once jetted in, tried a few slices and left town the same day.
All this for pies that he tops with mozzarella from the local Publix and bakes in a jerry-rigged KitchenAid electric range wrapped in so much tin foil it looks like a moon lander. Varasano, a software engineer by training, claims his pizzas are as good as any in the country. This fall, the city can put that claim to the test when he opens an actual pizzeria in south Buckhead.
Most fans discover Varasano, 41, through his Web site — a now-legendary reference text for the pizza-blogging demimonde. He first posted this 22,000-word opus in a single, near-infinite scroll in late 2004. It got picked up by the Web directory Boing Boing over a year later, and it promptly got so much traffic it crashed his server.
"It's one of the sickest things ever to hit the Internet," says Ed Levine, a pizza expert who now hosts Varasano's page — slice.seriouseats.com/jvpizza — on his food community, Serious Eats. "It's like the 'War and Peace' of pizza blog posts. And the thing is, Jeff does it in this really geeky way."
Oh, yeah. Varasano — a software engineer who set out to "reverse engineer" a pizza as light and gently charred as the one he considers New York's best — has refined his technique over the past eight years and via umpteen thousands of pies.
"I didn't set out to run experiment after experiment," says Varasano, adding that one attempt melted all the plastic off a toaster oven. "Every one I thought was going to be the one."
A pizza wasteland
His intensive trial-and-error methodology hasn't resulted in a recipe as much as something more like a mapping of the pizza genome.
How did he do this? Why did he do this? What would motivate a techie who was supposed to develop the next big thing in database management to give his life over to pizza?
That's easy. He moved to Atlanta.
A Bronx native, Varasano had always taken good pizza for granted. But then on a fateful day 10 years ago, he walked into a metro Atlanta chain that boasted "New York Style Pizza," ordered a slice, and ...
"And I felt like I was in bizarro world," says Varasano, shuddering at the memory. Everything was wrong with it.
He tried more Atlanta pizza and responded with "condescending disgust." When he went home to New York, he began scouring the city for the best, the archetype, the ur-pizza.
He found it at Patsy's, a classic old-time joint in Harlem. What made this crust so good? He brought some home and baked it in his oven. He used some as a starter for his own batch, convinced that this step was necessary for great dough.
Varasano had his plate full with his software, a pro-ject for which he had raised $3 million in venture capital. But his mind kept wandering back, obsessively, to pizza. Surely, he could crack the code.
Geek god of pizza
To understand the Varasano mind and its approach to problem solving, it helps to know a couple of things:
• One: At the age of 14, he set the U.S. Rubik's Cube record with a time of 24.67 seconds and then published "Jeff Conquers the Cube in 45 Seconds: And You Can Too!" This achievement was noted during an assembly of his freshman class at Yale.
• Two: He is prone to saying things like, "I can watch two ducks fight over a piece of bread and go home and apply that. I see connections that other people can't."
Speaking of which, guests at Varasano's gathering this evening have to gently compete for the pizza slices as they come out a bit slower than usual.
His oven, which would much rather be baking a casserole at 350, is balking. Set to the clean cycle, its temperature climbs to 800 degrees. A tray of ice water in the cabinet above works to keep the oven's thermostat from shutting the party down. Varasano takes regular readings of the oven temperature with an infrared thermometer that looks like a ray gun; as soon as it's high enough, he can bake a 13-inch pie in just 90 seconds.
Varasano slips a foil coverlet over his pizza stone for a minute. "The stone's got to be cooler than the top because the top is radiated heat," he explains. The mysteries of heat conduction revealed themselves to him one night as he was cooking a steak, and it was a breakthrough for his pizza.
The pizzas emerge from the oven puffed with blisters, speckled with char and as light as clouds. His guests, collectively, swoon. They eat for free; their word-of-mouth will be priceless.
Taking his pie public
As people wait for the next pie, they mingle. One group compares pizzerias they've visited in Rome. Deborah Duchon, the food anthropologist familiar from the Food Network's "Good Eats," remarks, "I thought the flavor combinations were very interesting."
Indeed, along with his unique technique, Varasano has developed trademark recipes. One pie has ricotta, arugula and lemon; another holds dates, walnuts and rosemary. All are listed on prototype menus he passes out to the crowd.
Stokley — Varasano's good friend and a partner in the pizza business — directs guests to two laptops set up on pedestals. One presents the Web site in semi-digestible chunks. Another flashes fan mail from all over the world. "You come China, make pizza for profit," reads one.
Investors have approached Varasano about setting him up in the pizza business, but he and Stokley are planning on going it alone when they open this fall in the new Mezzo Atlanta building on Peachtree. Disagreements with partners, he claims, doomed his software business.
Isn't he nervous about the pressure of running and cooking in a restaurant?
"No," Varasano says. "Once I learn the brick oven, it won't be too different from what I do here."
Levine, who has tried all the best pizzas in America for "Pizza: Slice of Heaven," his definitive book on the subject, says the proof will be in the pie.
"Jeff thinks like an engineer," Levine says. "Things will be different when he's actually doing it in real time and not as a high-flying chemistry/physics experiment. If he can do it successfully on the fly, that's what will make him a great pie man."
I’ll give you the perch. I used to go to a place that made a danged good perch sandwich every Lent...mmmm...might have to visit the family next Easter :)
you never hit Pizzeria Regina on Thatcher Street in the North End then...a hole in the wall, but what a good pie!!
I’m a bit of an amateur baker myself these days. I’m happy to see my poolish compares favorably to his.
you beat me to it... ; )
I’d argue the other way around. NY style may have come first, but it was only a stepping-stone on the way to true pizza. :-)
Incidentally, there is not a single “Chicago style”; there are at least two: deep dish (which most people think is the typical Chicago style) and thin crust (which is not all that thin, and is the more common pizza style in Chicagoland). There’s also “stuffed pizza,” which is like deep dish, but has more “stuff” than crust.
I used to love the perch sandwiches at the Marina Restaurant at Cedar Point. That’s goodtime summer memories.
ping
Best thin crust in the Chicagoland:
http://local.yahoo.com/info-17213695-village-pizza-carpentersville
And Chicago-style “pizza” is pure filth. How people choke down that goo will always be a mystery to me.
The only pizza in Texas that's even close to NY pie is that made at Campisi’s Egyptian Room on Mockingbird Lane in Dallas.
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“I agree. It’s 100% the water.”
No chance. If that was true, similar water of New Hampshire and Maine would yield excellent pizza. It doesn’t. Our pizzas are slimy and taste like they are made with spaghetti sauce.
We have Greek pizza. It’s terrible.
The guy in the article has the right idea. The secret is the right ingredients along with an exceedingly hot oven. Good sauce takes fresh basil and oregano, good olive oil and good Italian tomatoes in a sauce that hasn’t been boiled for 4 hours. Fresh mozzerella doesn’t leave an oil slick on the pizza.
I haven’t read his recipe yet, but I’ll bet his mix of flours and the kneading/resting process is quite specific.
I’ve been able to make a decent pizza in my kitchen. To make a really good one, I would need an oven that heats much hotter than the 475 or so that I get.
In NYC I could go into Penn Station and choose between two excellent pizza places (what subway did I come in on? $1.25 for a small slice or $1.50 for a huge slice? Whose selling beer?). That's without going outside. If I was going to Brooklyn the option opened up further. The best slice I think I ever had was some place downtown in a sketchy part of, I think, Hell's Kitchen. Pizza was a buck a slice for whatever toppings were already made, from 3 pm until dinner time (for the school kids I guess). Great pizza. I wish I could remember the place.
I’ve pretty much been stuck in Georgia all my life and don’t know one style of pizza from another, but the best pizza I’ve ever put in my mouth is the original Shakey’s Special with a thin crust and salami, pepperoni, Italian sausage, seasoned ground beef, mushrooms, black olives and popcorn shrimp. My friends and I used to say it caused “mouth gasms”. Man I want one!
Speaking of pizza in the Philadelphia area, there’s a place called Franzone’s in Plymouth Meeting (around here they just call it Plymouth) that is the best in the entire area, IMHO.
You have to know where it is in order to find it.
I came home from work today, anticipating the tasty almost half-a-large-pizza remainder of the double pepperoni, Italian sausage and mushroom that I ordered last night would be tonight’s dinner and almost went over the edge because there were only two slices left.
I may go get another one tonight.
They also sell a most excellent cheesesteak for about six bucks.
That would be Plan B.
There was this lebanese place I used to go to, had the best meat pies- lots of onion and a great pie case. Tasted very different from a pasty, but it satisfied the same craving...mmmmm....That’s the other thing I missed about New York. All the supermarkets had plenty of English food. I didn’t have to go out of my way for Flakes or Ribena or marrowfat peas.
I just emailed jeff and hope he can give me a line on
decent pizza here in Atlanta.
>>>>>The best pizza I have found in Northern Virginia is “Emilio’s” in Sterling
Yea, it rings a bell, but it’s a haul for us “inside the Beltway” types.
>>>>>>NYC to take in a Yankees game. We went for four days and let me tell ya-—I loaded up on pizza.
I’d love to do a NYC tour based on the Slice blog
(referenced in the article above). I think it would take a full week.
>>>>A bagel shop opened up near our business and he tried it and said, nope, not any good, they need the NY water!
Manhattan Bagels in Arlington VA (ironically only 5 minutes from my pizza fave) is outstanding for NYC-type bagels. I know I could find bagels in NYC that aren;t as good.
Rosenfeld’s in Newton Center MA is also great, it’s a hole in the wall that sells bagels and cream cheese and other refridge items *only*. One line from the front door to the counter, order your stuff and go. Good bialys too. Used to stop by there for a dozen almost every Saturday night, they stayed open very late, I think until midnight.
Good and accurate reviews here:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/rosenfeld-bagel-company-newton-center
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