Seattle to join his wife, food writer Molly Wizenberg, he was
unhappy with the pizza that he found.
“Any random corner pizza place in New Jersey was better than
the ‘good stuff’ I found here,” he tells me. “Pizza here was
underdone; there was no char, no salt in the dough; the sauce was a
cooked sauce. It wasn’t bright at all.”
At home, Pettit started experimenting with making his own
pizza. He read an essay in Jeffrey Steingarten’s book about
tricking one’s oven to heat hotter than normal (a scalding-hot oven
is important for excellent pizza) by wrapping the thermostat with
cold, wet T-shirts. Twenty minutes later, the T-shirts were on fire
and Wizenberg forbade him from trying it again.
But Pettit persisted, recalling something he had learned in music
school about Aaron Copland’s music teacher Nadia Boulanger.
“She said, ‘If you want to write a piano sonata, listen to every
sonata out there. Then pull your favorite things from all of those,
pick the best, and use that in your own work.’” Pettit applied this
to pizza by traveling the country and sampling the nation’s best
pizzas.
“I liked the texture of the pizza at John’s on Bleecker Street in
New York,” he says. “I liked the cheese from Di Fara on Avenue J
in Brooklyn. The sauce from Cafe Lago in Seattle.”
The pizza at Delancey is the apotheosis of Pettit’s pizza
passion. Each pie comes out crisp and crackling from the wood-
burning oven (no wet T-shirts visible), the sauce bright red, the
whole thing slicked with olive oil. To my mind, it rivals some of