Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [7]
Letizia’s Pizza
666 Main Ave. (Town Line Shopping Center)
203–847–6022
Norwalk, CT
LD | $$
“I wish I had some of that New Haven aura,” says Dan Letizia from behind the counter of the restaurant he runs with his brother Dennis in a Norwalk strip mall wedged in among Wal-Mart, Outback, Staples, and Starbucks. Letizia’s physical aura, such as it is, is that of a modest family-owned deli, walls decorated with heirloom photos of “Uncle Joe” (their grandfather), mementoes of the Brooklyn Dodgers (Papa Letizia’s favorite team), and a collage of hockey-player trading cards faded blue from exposure to sunlight. “I put up the cards because the store looked like a hospital room when we moved in,” Dan says. “I wanted people to have something to look at while they waited for their pizza.”
While the setting isn’t much, Letizia’s name is part of northeast pizza history, one of the first in the region to serve it—as a weekend-only item—when Joe Letizia opened his restaurant down on Norwalk’s Wall Street in 1937. Well after his death in 1962, Uncle Joe’s was still known as a source of fine red-sauce meals at rock-bottom prices. The family sold the old place in 1985 (it is now in others’ hands), but today’s Letizia’s, opened by grandson Dan in 1992, still offers baked ziti and manicotti, spaghetti with marinara, and hot-parm grinders on made-here rolls. Those things are fine; however, with pizza this good, they’re immaterial.
As is true of New Haven’s greats, crust matters immensely. Baked on a screen then further toughened on the oven’s brick floor, it is medium-thin Neapolitan-style, chewy more than brittle, with a full, earthy taste. Traditional mozzarella and sauce—the same food service brands the family has used since the beginning—meld into a creamy Italian-American slurry with veins of tomato tang. Add disks of pepperoni weeping oil into the mix, and you’ve got a mighty bite that is outrageously juicy. It is best consumed the New York City way, by pulling one triangular slice from the circle and folding it in half along the radius—the crust is pliable enough to bend, not break—creating a trough that holds everything like an open-top calzone.
Louis Lunch
261 Crown St.
203–562–5507
New Haven, CT
L | $
A small brick building with school-desk seats and an ancient wooden counter with years’ worth of initials carved into it, Louis Lunch cooks hamburgers in fat-reducing metal broilers that predate George Foreman’s Lean Mean Grilling Machine by almost a century. The result is a plump, moist patty with a crusty edge. Ken Lassen, grandson of founder Louis and now a very senior citizen himself, happened to drop by one day in the summer of 2005 to watch his progeny cook burgers and we got into a conversation with him about what makes his hamburgers taste special. He assured us with a straight face that when he was a young man he developed a formula of grinding different cuts in exact proportion to replicate beef from the good old pre-hormone days of full-flavored, range-fed longhorn cattle.
Louis burgers are served on toast because when Louis Lassen began serving them in his little lunch wagon over a hundred years ago, there was no such thing as a hamburger bun. In fact, it is possible that there was no such thing as a hamburger. Some culinary historians believe that this is where the hamburger was invented. Others attribute it to the Tartars or to the Earl of Salisbury or to sailors from Hamburg, Germany, but Louis Lunch devotees contend that it was born of Louis Lassen’s thrifty nature. The hamburger was his way of doing something useful with the leftover trimmings from the steak sandwiches he sold at his lunch wagon.
Whichever origin is true, Louis Lunch is an essential stop on America’s burger trail. The hamburgers are moist and crusty, available with a schmear of Cheez Whiz, if desired, and the place itself, now run by a fifth generation of the Lassen family, is a