Zev Green
Zev is a first-year ALT in Iyo City. He hails from the lovely city of Portland, Oregon, and has had a lifelong connection to Japan inherited from his mom, who was an ALT herself some thirty years ago. He attended Japanese immersion elementary school in Portland and has been studying Japanese off-and-on ever since (heavy emphasis on the off, as his Japanese is not great). Zev’s primary interest is cuisine (as documented on his personal food/travel blog, zeveatsit.com), but he also has a burning passion for music, movies, sports, prestige TV, and recreationally reading Wikipedia. He thinks that The Sopranos is the pinnacle of creative fiction, the Grateful Dead are the greatest American rock n’ roll band ever, and Deni Avdija will be an All-Star this season. He has many other strong opinions and enjoys discussing them – if you want to hear more, subscribe to his blog!
The humble slice of pizza has gone through many evolutions throughout the centuries. While the origin of the term “pizza” only goes back about a thousand years, the history of pizza-like foods extends much further into the dusty annals of time. As long as people have been busy, they have needed a filling, portable, and affordable snack. The Ancient Israelites, fleeing Egypt, had no time for their bread to rise, so instead baked a thin cracker called matzah. This wasn’t very good, so further innovation was needed. Persian soldiers around 500 BCE would bake a kind of flat bread on their shields and festoon it with cheese and dates. Cato the Elder, a few centuries later, wrote of “a flat round of dough dressed with olive oil, herbs, and honey baked on stones.” In the ruins of Pompeii, I saw ovens that were used to bake pizza – or pizza’s predecessor, if you want to be technical. Pinpointing exactly when pizza became pizza is tricky. Of course, tomatoes wouldn’t make their way to the New World for another 1500 or so years. While you can have a pizza without tomato sauce – think of a white pizza, like New Haven’s iconic clam apizza – it’s not quite the same.
Somewhere between then and now, Italian immigrants to the United States brought pizza with them. Crowded in with Jews, Germans, Greeks, and other assorted European immigrants, Italian immigrants opened the first pizzeria in 1905 – Lombardi’s, on Spring Street. Whatever pizza had been in the Old World, here it would change, assimilate, and adapt to the American palate and lifestyle. One of my favorite episodes of The Sopranos is when they go to Italy (S2, E4, “Commendatori”). Tony and Paulie Walnuts are psyched to visit their homeland, only to be disappointed by what they experience. Paulie, disgusted with authentic squid ink pasta, instead asks for “macaroni and gravy.” Ultimately, despite their talk about being “from the boot,” they’re much more comfortable back in New Jersey. While you could say a lot about this episode, I think it illustrates how Italians – like any immigrant group – are fundamentally changed by assimilation. Pizza, too, changed. Neapolitan pizza is fundamentally different from New York, New Haven, Detroit, Chicago (or, god forbid, Altoona) style pizza. There’s even a governing body for pizza based in Naples – you can imagine the kind of seedy, backroom details that occur there.
Whaddya hear, whaddya say?
A pizza restaurant plays a prominent role in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). Sal’s Famous Pizzeria in Bedford-Stuyvesant is a pillar of the community, and even though most Italians and other ethnic whites have fled Bed-Stuy for deeper Brooklyn, Queens, or the suburbs long ago, Sal understands that his pizza is important to the people who live there. There’s a reason why Spike Lee chose a pizzeria as the physical crux of his movie. Everyone eats pizza; it has long since transcended any notion of being an “ethnic food” to become something that is universally recognized as American. The mozzarella is a connective tissue tying us all together. Though the movie ends in tragedy, I don’t think I’m wrong to underscore the role of pizza in it.
The more I think about it, the more I think that for this movie to work, it couldn’t have been any other kind of restaurant
I’ve eaten pizza all over the world. In the town of Pedasi, on the southeastern tip of Panama’s Pacific Coast, we randomly stumbled across a partially constructed restaurant/guesthouse. A young Italian couple ran the place, and they had painstakingly shipped a brick pizza oven on a boat from Italy. They opened up a duffel bag to reveal a plethora of cured meats and cheeses, smuggled back from the motherland. Several Great Danes wandered around as they fired up the pizza oven for us, the only customers in the place. When I insisted that my pizza have oregano (even as a nine-year-old, I had high standards), the Italian guy cried “always, always” (I think he was wearing a white tank top with a gold chain and greased back hair, too, although that might be a product of my imaginative stereotyping).
In Singapore, I had two different pizza spots. The former was an occasional (maybe two or three times a week) pop-up in a craft brewery in Little India. The operation consisted of a folding table with one of those portable little pizza ovens on top. They turned out delicious Neapolitan-style pizza, in addition to fried whitebait (one of my favorite bar-type snacks).
I forgot what the place was called, but nice char!
The latter was a New York-style joint called Sonny’s that serves it by the slice, both classic renditions and then more creative, locally-inspired concoctions like a slice topped with Chinese sausage, or beef rendang.
Sonny’s in Singapore
I’ve made the pilgrimage to New Haven, Connecticut, to try the legendary Sally’s, where my fingers were coated with soot by the time I was stuffed. New Haven is my favorite style; thin crust, cooked hot and fast, crispy, and charred.
The aforementioned white clam pie
I also went out to a location of Frank Pepe’s (the other New Haven institution) that opened at the Westfield Montgomery Mall in Bethesda, Maryland (no relation to legendary jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery).
Shoutout Ellis and Henry for accompanying me
In Mexico City, I had some wood-fired fare in the historic neighborhood of Coyoacan. I’ve brought pizza on the plane, for myself to eat. I’ve forgotten the pizza I was supposed to eat on the plane in the car. But my favorite pizza in DC is Andy’s. I like the hot honey, what can I say?
I’ve eaten food truck pizza at the Portland Art Museum. I even brought a slice of pizza all the way from Apizza Scholls in Portland to my friend in Seoul. By the way, some noted pizza experts have said that Portland is the best city for pizza in the country. This made a lot of people from New York very upset. While my fair city may lack its own regional style of pizza, that isn’t the criterion. My personal top three for Portland pizza are Apizza Scholls, Dimo’s, Double Mountain, and Escape From New York – yes, I know that’s actually four, I can count.
From left to right: Dimo’s, Double Mountain, Apizza Scholls
While I love and appreciate pizza of all kinds (even though Chicago deep dish is more of a quiche situation, it’s delicious), my favorite pizza experience comes from a certain type of establishment. It’s not unlike Sal’s Famous from the movie. You walk in, and you instantly recognize that, in the words of Anthony Bourdain, you’re in a “no bullshit zone.”
Escape from New York (since 1983) in Portland is the gold standard of this – don’t even THINK about asking for ranch
Though I may enjoy edible flowers on my pizza and butter in my ass, I recognize that pizza is the fuel of the international proletariat and that kind of foofy bullshit is just a frivolous frill. A real slice joint should have stickers on the wall dating back to before you were born, the shakers with oregano, parmesan, and chili flakes, and a questionable bathroom. It better be served to you on a grease-soaked paper plate, too. Acceptable beverage options are soda or macropisslager – nothing better than Kona.
Even a podunk town like Missoula has one of these places, complete with the requisite Gang Starr playing
But, in case you weren’t aware, I’m in Japan. While they love Italian food here, American pizza is harder to find. Especially in a third-tier city like Matsuyama (that’s an objective reading, not a diss – Portland is probably a third-tier city as well). I’ve gone without pizza for a long time now. Too long. I haven’t been counting the days, but judging from my camera roll, the last time I had pizza was at Dimo’s in Portland on June 27th. This is a travesty – maybe the longest I’ve gone without pizza in my entire life. Believe me, I’ve searched. I patronized an Italian restaurant where you can see the brick pizza oven as you walk past – twice. The pizza was whatever – small, Neapolitan, and resistant to my efforts to fold it. It wasn’t what I was looking for. So for dramatic effect, let’s pretend like it didn’t happen. One day, I visited a burger spot in Iyo run by one of the few non-ALT foreign residents (a guy from LA who’s been living here for a dozen years), and asked him if there was a place to get a New Yorkesque slice – he said no. On my winter vacation, I was looking for a slice, but I was shot down in Tokyo and had an unfulfilling square slice in Hong Kong. I had mostly given up.
Until this weekend. Until I randomly walked by a video advertisement for what looked like exactly what I wanted. A place called Pizza Sapp. That made sense to me. I am a sap, a sap for pizza, a sap for misunderestimating the good people of Matsuyama and foolishly thinking that there wouldn’t be a single soul in this town of half a million who appreciated a slice of pizza like I do.
So here we are. I’m starving, and when I walk in and see a lineup of pizzas in a glass display, I immediately have a great feeling. I ask for a slice of pepperoni (which I won the rights to by emerging victorious at a vigorous match of rock-paper-scissors against my friend John) and a slice of cheese. I also take advantage of the soda fountain (somewhat of a rarity in Japan.)
Two textbook slices. Undercarriage looks nice. Doesn’t flop when you fold it. Seasoning shakers, check (although no parm). It’s $9 for two slices and my Coke. That’s exactly what it should cost. Is it the best pizza I’ve ever had in my entire life? No. But it’s exactly what I’ve been wanting all this time. In the words of my eloquent friend John Matsuyama (not his name per se, but his last name sounds similar and is hard to pronounce, so it’s close enough), the chef demonstrates “a fundamentally strong understanding of pizza.” It’s enough to make me emotional. They also offer fried chicken, which is kind of wild to me (I would be wary of a pizza place back home that served chicken, and vice versa), but it doesn’t look half bad, and I’ve also been missing my beloved Popeyes.
Shoutout to the newest Portland Trail Blazer, Vit Krejci – I’m excited to have someone on this team who can improve our league-worst 3-Point percentage (.336, despite ranking 3rd in attempts)
I ask the guy behind the counter if this is a new shop, and he says it’s been around for about two years. This is surprising because I figured I would have come across it in my research, or someone would have mentioned it to me. Also, I’ve definitely walked down this particular street before, yet never noticed it. I asked him if he studied pizza in America, and I couldn’t follow his answer exactly (some sort of no), but apparently they have a sister restaurant – Sapp Burger – actually, in hindsight, not sure what that has to do with America. Maybe that’s why the Iyo burger guy didn’t tell me about this place – he didn’t want to give free publicity to his competition. But between the pizza and the NBA highlights on the projector, this pizza maestro is a man after my own heart. We chat about the NBA for a few minutes – he’s a big fan of Stephon Castle, the electric guard out of UConn.
And that’s it. Pizza, like many things, is something I have a very strong opinion on. I know what I like, and what I don’t like. Like all American food, pizza comes from somewhere else. I’ve had Europeans try to dunk on America by claiming that there is no such thing as American cuisine. The presence of Native American foodways notwithstanding, American culture is defined by the melting pot/salad bowl (I prefer the term salad bowl, but more people are familiar with the melting pot) of ethnic groups from all over the world. And we all eat each other’s food. You can be in the most depressing strip mall in a generic place that could be anywhere in the suburban wasteland, but you can have a Mexican restaurant next to a Thai restaurant. Everyone eats pizza. Pizza is a universal language, even a blank canvas to paint on. You can put whatever you want on pizza – oxtail, shawarma, even char siu. Despite the recent anti-immigration messages/ideas present in America, immigrants define America. It has always been that way and will always be that way. And even in Japan where similar ideas have been present, one can still find a slice of optimism. I will be back at Pizza Sapp.
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Best, Justin
