It was three months before I ate pizza after moving back home to New York from Beirut. I was killing time before an improv show at UCB’s now-closed East Village outpost and on a whim, bought a slice on Second Avenue at one of those slice joints you’d never remember unless you were a regular.
A crime, I know. I was consumed with the bottomless buffet of other options — passable burritos, Chinese takeout, figuring out what poke was all about. And between the cheese mana’ish and the weekly pizza night I observed with some friends to honor the two-for-$10 deal at Dominos, I’d had enough pizza-adjacent food in Beirut to make it seem less pressing.
As I’ve said before, visiting home is harder than going somewhere new. But it’s even more difficult when you’ve been gone for a few years, and when you’re back for good. You’re no longer on vacation. Shit is real. That new president, the terrible health care, the even worse Lebanese food. It’s no longer somewhere else. It’s all yours to contend with.
My compulsion to consume wasn’t really about wanting to experience new things. It was re-education, learning how to be an American again.
Turns out, it’s really hard to have a conversation with people if you both aren’t up to date with all of the cultural talking points. Especially when you can’t talk about what you were doing for the past five years — even my deepest eye rolls are reserved for people won’t stop mentioning their time abroad. When you go somewhere else you expect this. When it happens in the place you thought you’d been representing for years, well, it’s a shock.
One of the first things I did when I landed in New York in May 2017 was relaunch my Netflix and Hulu accounts. I wanted to get caught up. I watched an astronomical amounts of TV that first year back, especially during those three months when I was still figuring out work. I absorbed dialogue, characters, references, fashion. Even the political bents of characters and storylines were novel to me. Something big had happened while I was away and I wasn’t sure how to participate again.
Sure, I could access shows in Lebanon, but watching it in that context felt totally different. Back in New York, I was watching alongside an audience of Americans. Everything felt new and unsettling. I even started calling TV television, like it was some newfangled entertainment — a tic I still can’t seem to shake.
The same was true with food. I’ve always been an avid consumer of food media. In college, when I was still a vegetarian, I’d snack on carrots while reading Serious Eats reviewers describe peking duck pancakes and xao long bao (back when it was a restaurant review site). Abroad, I scrolled through Instagram and watched an embarrassing amount of Buzzfeed videos. I read as many Lucky Peach articles as I could before it went bust. I thought I knew what was going on, but like countless of others I’d been tricked by the Internet.
The Instagram food thing was a surprise — and it’s also surprising in retrospect that I didn’t see it coming. Places that were extra-hyped, I learned, were almost guaranteed to be underwhelming, expensive and have a long wait time. Beautiful food rarely tasted good, especially anything saturated with dye.
This is not news to anyone now, but then I felt offended. My understanding of what was really going on back home was completely wrong. I was thrown off kilter.
And so I was wrong about what I needed to eat to feel at home. Sure, that first plate of scallion pancakes and pork spare ribs were fantastic. But it was nothing compared to that thin slice on a flimsy paper plate, dusted in the requisite oregano, pepper flakes and parm.
The way the dough wrinkled, steamed under the sauce and cheese. The thinness kept it from being mushy or bready. In fact, there is barely any bread in a good New York slice, outside of the crust. It’s that thin layer of wrinkled dough and the crisp bottom, extra crackly from an extra pop in the oven. You just don’t get that in Beirut.
That first bite hit me hard. Food that good, that nostalgic sends you right back to that place, where I’d been going with every single other New York slice that counted.
The Friday slices at Sacco Pizza on Ninth Avenue and 54th, waiting between music classes at The School For Strings.
Drunk or stoned slices from the corner place across from Tompkins Square — you know the one I’m talking about.
Slices from My Little Pizzeria in 1994, which I claimed was the best restaurant in Brooklyn in an elementary school project. And the —yes, I will admit — much better pies I’d have visiting my dad’s family in East Haven, Connecticut.
I knew at that moment that I was home. And yes, while the world still felt like it falling apart around me, I felt a little less like I was interpreting everything through Google translate. I was in the pizza place. If that’s not home then I’m not sure what is.
Tonight we’re ordering from Joe & Johns, a local joint. They make New York pies right. With the city shutting down, I’ve begun to feel alienated again, I think we all are. But I also think this can set me right. Even if only for an hour.
theyellowlunchbox 