Keste and more NYC eats.

I’m chatting today at 1 pm ET.

In the last three weeks, I’ve hit three more places from Food and Wine‘s list of the 48 best pizzerias in the country (I don’t know why they chose 48, and it’s 47 now anyway with one closed), and I’ve at least found one rival to Pizzeria Bianco for the best pizzeria in the country, as well as hitting the first of the four spots from the list located in Brooklyn.

Keste, located on Bleecker in Greenwich Village, is run by an Italian pizzaiolo who was born and raised outside of Naples and learned the craft of pizza-making in that city, the capital of pizza in Italy. The style is true Neapolitan, with a thin crust and a soft center so that the crust struggles to support the toppings, and Keste does it correctly, something few places that boast of serving “authentic” Neapolitan pizzas manage to do. The menu is quite large, with a huge selection of pizzas with tomato sauce, a small selection of “white” pizzas, and a number of gluten-free options. My friend Toby and I ordered two pizzas and split them – the margherita with buffalo mozzarella and the daily special with burrata, prosciutto, and truffle oil.

The crusts on both were spectacular, exactly as promised, with a little char on the exterior, good tooth on the exterior crust, and just enough underneath to keep the toppings off the plate and give some texture contrast. The special was among the best pizzas I’ve ever had thanks to the creaminess and bright flavor of the burrata, and the salty-but-not-too-salty prosciutto, as well as the hint of truffle flavor that didn’t overwhelm any of the other ingredients. The margherita was notable more for the brightness of the tomatoes than anything else, with good balance between that and the mozzarella di bufala. The flavors on both pizzas were loud, in a good way, and everything was balanced and fresh and just incredible.

A few weeks ago, I managed to sneak into Co., the pizzeria founded by Jim Lahey of no-knead bread fame, for dinner with my family on a trip to Boston. The crust was outstanding, as you’d expect, but the rest of the experience fell very short for us. For one thing, the pizzas were small and sparsely topped, skimping especially on cheese, which is kind of the essential ingredient when pizza is the entree because it’s the only real protein source on any pizza without meat. For another, I am not sure when I have ever been in a colder restaurant than Co. was on that night – it could not have been over 65 degrees in there – and it was incredibly loud. I was more impressed with the bread and olive oil starter, which does a better job of showing off Lahey’s technique, than I was with either of the pizzas we ordered. I’ll tolerate atmosphere issues if the food is amazing, but the crust was just good, not enough to make me want to deal with the conditions there.

Franny’s in Brooklyn was an outright disappointment, however – so sparsely topped that it was more like having bread for lunch than pizza, with almost nothing beyond a thin layer of tomato sauce on top. The crust was gorgeous, with some blistering on the exterior, great tooth to the exterior, and a good contrast between the edge and the interior. But man, you need to put something on top of the pizza to get me to fight my way down Flatbush to come eat at your place.

Moving on from pizza … After Keste, Toby dragged me kicking and screaming to Grom, a gelateria (one of two Groms in the city, plus a summer location in Central Park) that imports the product from Italy. Their commitment to product quality is insane, with organic eggs, spring water for their sorbets, and fruit from their own farm in Costigliole d’Asti. And the gelato is amazing – the dark chocolate “sorbet,” made with egg yolks and Colombian chocolate but no dairy, is as intense as eating a bar of very dark chocolate but with the creamy texture of actual gelato; the caffè flavor uses Guatemalan coffee beans to create a dark coffee flavor that doesn’t hide the coffee behind sugar and cream. It’s a hell of an experience even when you’re already overstuffed with pizza. (I also love that their URL is grom.it; too bad walla.ce isn’t available.)

Culture Espresso on 38th Street doesn’t roast its own coffee, but buys from some of the best roasters in the country – currently using coffees from Heart roasters in Portland, Oregon, a micro-roaster that specializes in very light roasts of single-estate coffees. Culture is currently using a blend of two coffees, an Ethiopian and a Central American (I think the barista said Colombian), which produced a medium-bodied shot that still had the bright strawberry notes of the east African half of the blend.

Friday links and bullets.

• Yesterday’s chat transcript.
• I won’t say the name of the Project Runway winner, for those of you who DVR’d it but haven’t watched it, but it looked to me like the judges chose probability over upside – and I’m a firm believer in going for upside. You have a chance to get an all-world talent, whether it’s a #1 starter or a fashion genius or a revolutionary chef, that’s who you go for. This wasn’t an example of the upside designer flopping in the finals; my wife, the real PR fan in the house, was mad because she thought the upside designer did exactly what the judges praised the designer for all season.
• Had breakfast this morning at the Hillside Spot in Ahwautukee, at Warner and 48th just west of I-10. To borrow a term from a certain AFL super-fan, it was “out-STAN-ding.” I’ve been hoping to find a funky, progressive kind of breakfast/lunch spot like that since we moved here, and I’m glad Phoenix magazine highlighted them last month. The food took a little while to get to us, even though the place wasn’t busy, but everything was made to order and that is the best reason in the world to wait for food.
• This NPR story on how the private prison industry pushed through Arizona’s immigration law is a model for modern journalism, a type of investigative reporting I don’t see as often as I did ten or fifteen years ago. I wish NPR did more of it, and given how many candidates campaigning here are using their position on the law as a major part of their platforms, it should be mailed to every voter in Arizona before Tuesday. (I’m not advocating a vote either way on any candidate or ballot question – merely that voters should be informed before making any voting decisions.)

• One of my favorite restaurants in Vegas, Lotus of Siam, is opening a second location Greenwich Village.
• I’m still under the weather, so I didn’t head to any AFL games and won’t today, but the forced rest meant that I finished Richard Russo’s tremendous novel Bridge of Sighs and am already halfway through Dave Jamieson’s Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, a quirky history of the baseball card industry – or a history of the quirky baseball card industry, and the quirky people at the heart of it. (I received a review copy of Mint Condition from the publisher.) I hope to post a review of Bridge of Sighs over the weekend.