Pizza -- Better than Sex

I hesitate to compliment anything related to New York City -- a disproportionate number of New Yorkers are already self-satisfied assholes who need flattery like a submarine needs a screen door -- but I can't deny the superiority of NYC pizza. Hands-down, the best. There's no debating this.

The last time I visited NYC, I wandered into a West Village joint called Bleecker Street Pizza. I was with my brother, and we were actually trying to find a different pizzeria, some variant of "Ray's Pizza" that I had eaten at the day before. The slice I had scarfed down there had been adequate, and since my bro had just moved to NYC, I felt a familial obligation to direct him to this particular Ray's. It's essential to expeditiously file a solid pizza purveyor in your mental Rolodex whenever you to move to a new town, let alone NYC.

That second day I couldn't find my Ray's for the life of me. I kept getting turned around in the labyrinthine maze of West Village streets around 6th and 7th Avenues, and though I would've been swimming in it had I been searching for vintage clothes or gay sex toys, as far as a slice of Ray's was concerned, I was getting nowhere.

Soon enough we were starving, and the aimless wandering wasn't helping, so we decided to throw in the towel and take our chances on the first pizza joint we walked past. This turned out to be Bleecker Street Pizza, a small, unassuming hole-in-the-wall without much visually recommending it other than a sign indicating that the Food Network had designated it as the best pizzeria in the city -- slightly more than a mere trivial distinction, we figured.

Now, at the risk of insulting your intelligence, I'm going to lay out for you the three elements that are requirements for a satisfying slice of pizza: (1) Good cheese; (2) Good crust; and (3) Good sauce. Boom, boom, boom. As feasible as this three-pronged recipe may seem on paper, however, in practice it's a combination seldom achieved. More often than not, all three ingredients are substandard. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll chow on a slice with a full-flavored cheese, or one with delectably tangy sauce, or perhaps one with extraordinarily buttery crust. But all three united in one slice? Not likely.

So it was with great surprise that I felt my knees buckling as I bit into the slice at Bleecker Street Pizza: rich, ripened cheese ... tart, tomatoey sauce ... crispy, buttery crust. All three hit me like a truckload of dopamine, and I literally had to sit down. Bottom line: if you're a pizzaphile, Bleecker Street Pizza in the West Village had better be on your punch-list the next time you're in NYC.

And, from what I can tell, it's also a good neighborhood if you're in the market for nipple rings.