The long-awaited Trinacria pizza: all in the toppings?

Trinacria Cafe
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.

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.

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?).

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.

4.5/8 slices

Review: Kyro Pizza

Kyro Pizza

900 Cathedral St.

Baltimore, MD

We arrived at Kyro Pizza on a dreary evening and were treated to dreary pizza. Not that it was bad pizza necessarily, but it was not the kind of pizza that inspires faith in the progress of civilization. With so much going on in the pizza world, and the stakes in the gourmet pie game growing ever higher, it's disappointing to encounter a place with the form, but not the content, of pizza connoisseurship.

nice-looking wall thing

Kyro has a snazzy design scheme, with website, menu, and interior décor coordinated to convey some kind of young, hip, trendy vibe. But is it enough to install a brick oven and write “Maryland's best brick oven pizza” on your website banner? They offer a lot of other Middle Eastern menu items which are perhaps better than their pizza – for some reason, restaurants like to tack pizza onto their normal offerings, but it's a bad move to promote lackluster pizza over the things that you actually make well. Really, our gripe with Kyro was the over-hyping – you can't design your way around average pizza with pretty signs.

When we slogged in from the rain on a swampy Wednesday night, there was one other occupied booth in the place. As we waited for pies, a discourse on cheese-pizza essentialism unfolded - I think the point was that plain cheese pizza is the closest that one can get to the pure Platonic form of pizza while trapped within the finite bounds of human consciousness. This conversation was relevant because there's a lot of stuff on the Kyro menu that my mom would think is “weird”/“crazy”: they are particularly noted for exotic pies like the Sharm el-Shek (salmon and caviar), the sloppy joe and hotdog pizzas, and the General Kyro, which is a pizza with General Tso's chicken on it. These items demonstrate that they are willing to put anything on a pizza, so we're supposed to give them credit for adventurousness. But what about the foundations? We ordered with an eye to uncovering the pure form of a Kyro pizza.

foundations: elasticity

We got four pies: a Margarita (tomato sauce and cheese, determined to be the most elemental cheese pizza out of four on the menu), a Dahb (grilled eggplant, roasted red peppers, garlic, tomato sauce, sun-dried tomatoes), Di Funghi (sauce, cheese, and mushrooms), and an India (Tandoori chicken, spicy tomato yogurt curry, squash and mozzarella with mango chutney). 

just regular pizza

The cheese pizza, a litmus test, did not bode well. Dan pointed out that Kyro's use of a brick oven was technically adept: the thin crust was correctly cooked, with a nice even bake, and the dough had been proofed correctly because there were no huge air bubbles. However, the crust lacked spring or bounce – it was very typical, and not really worth finishing. The central part of the pie could have used more sauce. The cheese was “fresh enough,” but too salty, and the whole thing lacked “zing.” Dan observed that pizza, like sex, is good even when it's bad, which is one way of looking at it.

Dahb pizza

We asked for a Dahb pizza with whole wheat crust, which, in light of their issues with regular crust, was a mistake. It was crunchy but bland and flavorless. The toppings were excellent, especially the eggplant, suggesting that it might be smart to order non-pizza menu items containing eggplant. The sauce, again, was standard pizza parlor sauce. What were we thinking, dragging down an adequate pizza in the name of health? I would caution against it. Get your whole grain fiber somewhere else.

vegan mushroom pizza

We also customized our mushroom pizza with soy cheese to test out Kyro's vegan accommodations (past reviewers have praised their vegan food). Nobody noticed the soy cheese, but that's because the pizza itself was just boring. It resembled any other pie you would get at a standard pizza parlor. In a world of specialty pizza inflation (see: Joe Squared's mushroom pizza with forty kinds of mushrooms), paying premium prices for shrively plain mushrooms is not cool ($15.50 for a 14” pie). This seems equitable towards the dairy and non-dairy consumer, at least, since veganizing made no noticeable difference in quality.

India pizza (chutney not pictured)

Finally, the meat-friendly dug in to the India pizza. They really liked the mango chutney that came in plastic containers on the side. “It's like dessert on a pizza,” said Chris. Upon closer examination we concluded that it might be Smucker's apricot jam. The tandoori chicken was a bit chewy, and nobody noticed the yogurt sauce. We proceeded to spread “chutney” on the remaining slices of every pie to make them more palatable.

yes to chutney

This may seem like an overly harsh evaluation, and it probably is. But things are competitive out there. A new high-end fancy pizza place opens every week. Claiming to be “the best” in this booming industry is an invitation to critical scrutiny, and Kyro Pizza doesn't hold up very well. At around $17 for a large specialty pie, you could do better somewhere else. If you really want caviar, and you want it on a pizza, then this is the place for you. However, from our perspective, fancy toppings don't make up for lackluster foundations.

“Good but not life-changing”

3.5/8

Twilight of the Pizzas

Dionysus Restaurant and Lounge, 8 E. Preston St.

Sometimes when I think about pizza, I think about the dynamic tension between man's darkest desires and the polite necessities of civilized life. Pizza can symbolize our urge to self-destruction, the attraction of the greasy abyss; yet it can also lead us to strive for something higher and better. I'm sad to report that, on the particular day that we visited, Dionysus was slipping towards the abyss. Their pizza was not very good.



Since Pizza Club members had visited Dionysus on many previous occasions and reported delicious pizza experiences, we were surprised by this finding. Unfortunately, our job is to give you an objective account of what happened. We suspect that something may have been amiss on this particular day, and to improve the accuracy of our sample, we will have to make another visit to determine whether the pizza we ate was an outlier. However, we present you here with the the facts as they stand.

Dionysus doesn't have pre-formulated specialty pizzas; you just pick from a list of toppings. Members of our group wanted more guidance, particularly with exotic toppings such as alligator, and perhaps we would have done better with chef's recommendations. The restaurant is Cajun-themed, so in addition to the alligator and seafood options, be aware that the all-purpose red sauce is usually spicy and garlicky (in a good way). On the ill-starred day of our visit, even the sauce lacked zing.

We ordered a large artichoke and mushroom pizza, a small crab and onion pizza, and a small alligator and spinach pizza. The first pie appeared steaming from the kitchen, heavy and lush with toppings. There was a lot of cheese, and a lot of sauce, and a lot of dough. It seemed unusually thick all around, and soon became spongy and unstable – a sloppy pizza. We enjoyed the artichoke and mushroom, but found the sheer quantity of gummy dough unmanageable. The second pizza (crab and onion) was not notable. The tomato sauce overpowered the other ingredients, and it might have been wiser to order crab on a white pie.



The third pizza was a novelty, since most of us had never eaten alligator. “The promise of eating an endangered species was exciting,” Jonah said, “but now I feel like I just wasted a life.” Presumably the alligator's. Some members reported that the enigmatic meat was “taut” in texture, with the consistency of chicken and the flavor of fish, but Tyler felt that “I still don't really know what alligator tastes like.”

Had we not sampled Dionysus' pizza in better times, we would have to write it off based on this experience. There were signs of the pizza that we know and love: the edge crust still had some light, bubbly texture to it, but in the middle of the pie things got gummy and we left feeling stuffed with dough. The cheese was good but laid on indiscriminately, lacking character, and without the nice browning or bubbling that you get with a thinner layer of cheese. The sauce was still faintly spicy, and had some garlic kick, but mostly it was too sweet and overabundant. We actually left multiple slices of pizza on the tray, uneaten. Dionysus is a nice bar and worth visiting to hang out and grab a beer, but at the moment we can't recommend that you go there just for the pizza.



4/8 slices