111 W. Centre St.
I wanted a lot of things from the new
Trinacria cafe that just opened on Centre Street in Mt. Vernon.
(This location, unfortunately, is cursed. It destroyed a 5 Guys Burger franchise, which is the most indestructible entity in America today).
Regular Trinacria, on Paca St., has all the delicious things like
cheese and pasta and cannolli and really cheap wine. They have all
the exotic things in cans from Italy, and olives, and pickled things,
and those green leaf-shaped cookie sandwiches with a layer of
chocolate stuff. Regular Trinacria is a wonderful place and you
should go there right now and order a muffaletto sandwich. The symbol
of Trinacria is a Medusa head with three disembodied legs spiraling
around it – this could be you right now, except instead of
disembodied legs you would be surrounded by sandwiches and six-dollar
bottles of wine, and you wouldn't have snakes for hair unless that's
your preference.
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| Regular Trinacria |
The idea of New Trinacria is to have
trained professionals assemble the raw materials available at Regular
Trinacria into food that you can eat right there on the premises, and
is warm, unlike the Regular Trinacria sandwiches which are generally
served cold and eaten on the curb, a park bench, or in one's office
cubicle. Although New Trinacria also offers the classic sandwiches in
case you hate change.
Since this is Pizza Club, we didn't try
most of the things on the New Trinacria menu, which include salads,
Hot Subs, Authentic Hot Italian Paninis, and Pastas. These items,
prepared from the most choice of the Trinacria specialty Italian
ingredients selection, are probably very good. Pizza Club convened an
emergency meeting this February because New Trinacria is officially
making pizza, and given the establishment's status as the reigning
superior source of Italian things (at this point “Little Italy”
is maintained entirely as a decoy to keep dumb people away from
Trinacria), we urgently had to try their pizza.
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| photographic evidence from this meeting was lost |
The family that runs Trinacria is of
Sicilian origin, but I'm not sure how relevant this is to their version of
pizza. Pizza in
the United States is a confused creature of
“Italian-American” cuisine. Pizza became a free-floating
signifier that could latch onto different food-substances and insert
itself into varied discourses: strange men named John claiming to be
your “Papa,” crime-fighting mutant sewer-turtles, harried mothers
placating their whiny post-piano-practice offspring.
Following the recent recovery of
gourmet pizza by people who loved the fast-food pizza of their
childhoods but now shop at Whole Foods, all bets are off as to what
qualities “Italian,” “Neapolitan,” “Sicilian,” etc.
actually indicate. At the New Trinacria, they seem to be going for a
version of standard American gourmet pizza; unfortunately, it doesn't
rival the pies that places like Iggies and Zella's have been making in
these times of escalating pizza connoisseurship/fetishism.
They've always sold pizza dough at
Regular Trinacria, and let's be honest, it's not the best. It's
pretty much bread dough that you stretch out to pizza shape. When you
put it in the oven at home, with delicious Trinacria cheese on top,
it turns into cheesy bread. It's ok though, because you made it at
home, you can feel good about not eating shit fast food, and there's
probably enough fresh mozzarella left for tomorrow's sandwiches.
However, putting pizza on the menu at
New Trinacria raises the stakes. At that point, they take on
accountability for the preparation and final outcome of the pie. It
must exceed that which we could accomplish at home by buying
ingredients from their store. Or, it must be cheap
enough to reflect that no value has been added aside from the
convenience of not having to assemble and cook it. The pies range in
price from $9 to $11 for a personal-sized pizza (about 8-10 inches
across) so you must reflect upon your own depth of pocketbook vs. desire for instant gratification.
New Trinacria's pizza definitely didn't
pass the “you could make it at home” test. For the moment,
they're cooking it in a regular convection oven, which means that the
crust tastes exactly like the crust you
would have made in your own kitchen. Pizza Club agreed that, given
the crust situation, this “pizza” is really more like a
flatbread. There were multiple comparisons to frozen,
microwaved, or cafeteria pizza crust.
We ordered every pizza on the menu
because we were so excited about the cornucopia of Trinacria plenty
before us. There are lots of good
vegetarian options, though of course Trinacria's deli meats and
sausage are top-notch, and the meat-eaters said that the Guido pie
(sausage, pepperoni, and salami) was their favorite. The proprietors
promised us that a mushroom pie will soon be added to their
offerings.
Of the non-meat pies, people liked the
Sweet and Salty (caramelized onions and garlic, olives, parsley, and
prosciutto which you can pick off if you're a vegetarian like me and really don't
care). Because of their large size and round nature, we suggest that
the olives be cut up rather than thrown on the pie whole.
There was consternation around the
sauce, which some Pizza Club members thought was plain "like a spaghetti sauce.” They wanted to taste more herbs, more salt,
and more tomato bite. At the same time, they requested greater quantities of this ideal sauce to
balance out the breadiness of the crust. The White House, Trinacria's
version of a white pie (mozzarella, ricotta, and roasted garlic) was
“kind of bland,” although the cheeses were obviously top-notch.
Unlike other pizza places, where we've
been overwhelmed with gratuitous toppings, Pizza Club would have
preferred these pies with more stuff on them because “the toppings
are what elevates it.” The quality of their ingredients make
Trinacria's pizza operation very promising, but it lacks strong
foundations in the realm of crust, sauce, and baking facilities (not
that we'd urge them to jump on the brick-oven bandwagon – there
must be other ways?).
We should emphasize that the people working at New Trinacria were very friendly, accommodating of our large group, and enthusiastic about their product. Eating there was a fun experience. We were excited to get out there right away and review their pizza, but perhaps we should have waited for them to work out the kinks. Maybe there was just too much at stake here pizza-wise. We hold Trinacria in such high regard that we began experiencing confusion, self-doubt and melancholic yearning. “I am incapable of thinking critically,” Patrick declared, while Chelsea reported that Trinacria pizza was “making me think of another, better pizza.”
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| L-R: olive, pepperoni, roasted garlic |
We should emphasize that the people working at New Trinacria were very friendly, accommodating of our large group, and enthusiastic about their product. Eating there was a fun experience. We were excited to get out there right away and review their pizza, but perhaps we should have waited for them to work out the kinks. Maybe there was just too much at stake here pizza-wise. We hold Trinacria in such high regard that we began experiencing confusion, self-doubt and melancholic yearning. “I am incapable of thinking critically,” Patrick declared, while Chelsea reported that Trinacria pizza was “making me think of another, better pizza.”
May that other, better pizza one day
meet us in the ground-floor corner retail space of that weird condo
on Centre St. and Park Ave. May Stephanie Rawlings Blake award
Trinacria an unaudited city contract to pump tapenade through the
degraded water mains of this city in perpetuity. Don't let the curse
of 111 Centre St. take down New Trinacria – just go get a sandwich.
