Yesterday began with my dragging Vicky High Life with me to Legal Sea Foods to satisfy my craving for steamers. I always enjoy introducing friends to great things they’ve never tried, and surprisingly, Vicky had never had steamer clams before. When they arrived at our table she took one look at them and in classic High Life fashion, she blurted “they look kind of like sperm”. Nice. We also had the soft shelled crabs, Alaskan king crab legs “Saigon style” (grilled and served with salt, pepper, wasabi and lime) and since she was hung over, I insisted she have some gazpacho too. As it always is at Legal, everything was fresh and simple. If you’re looking for creativity in your seafood, Legal is not the place to go, but if you just want fresh high quality seafood that stands on its own merit, it’s always a consistently solid choice.

After lunch, I offered to drive Vicky back to Brooklyn, but with one pit stop along the way- the next destination on my gastronomic agenda for the day, Eddie’s Sweet Shop in Queens. Always impossible to decide between the Orange Freeze and the Raspberry Freeze, it’s always best to go with someone so you can get both. Sharing is convenient because Eddie’s serves some of the freeze in a classic egg cream glass and gives you the remainder in the metal tumbler that it was made in along with one of those long metal spoons to scoop it out.

There really is something about their freezes that makes them so incredibly good. Like an extra dimension of flavor. I always tell people the Orange Freeze tastes like a creamsicle, but when you taste it, even though you’re expecting that flavor, somehow it’s brighter and has a little extra oomph of flavor that makes it even more creamsicly than any creamsicle ever was. It’s really similar to the experience of tasting vegetables at Charlie Trotters for the first time, where it’s like rediscovering what each vegetable is really supposed to taste like. Eddie’s freezes are what creamsicles and raspberry ice cream are supposed to taste like, only better.

After dropping The High Life off at work I returned home to veg on the sofa a bit. In keeping with the theme of the day, I watched an episode of the awesome interview series “Chef’s Story”, this one featuring Andre Soltner, the man who was Lutece for all those glory years. The two things that impressed me from the interview were that he truly believes that food in NY is better than that in France now, and that he thinks of great chefs as craftsmen, not artists. To the latter point, he says the difference is that if an artist is not pleased with something he’s working on, he can just start over again tomorrow. Not so with a chef who has to be prepared to deliver perfection twice a day no matter what. How true.

A little later, Kat texted me that she and Ricky were going to catch the 10:30p showing of Ratatouille at the theater on 2nd ave and 12th. Hrmmm… perfect! I decided to head in early and grab some pizza a block away at Una Pizza Napoletana, Anthony Mangieri’s pizza joint that is often mentioned in the same breath as Pizzeria Bianco. I needed to see for myself how it compared. I ordered a margherita pizza and a glass of wine. The wine was an aglianico served in a little water glass filled to the brim. It was a fruity full bodied wine that was nothing complex or nuanced, just a mild mannered pleasure to drink as I waited for my pizza. And when the pizza arrived, the real pleasure began. Unfortunately it was pretty dark in there and my camera phone takes crappy pictures in those conditions, but here’s the picture anyway:

Let’s start with the crust- perfectly thin, with exactly the right amount of charring. It was light and airy in texture yet it had a big bready flavor to it. Even with the toppings, the flavor of the crust stood out. The basil, charred to a crisp in spots, was clean and fresh tasting. The olive oil was a little disappointing since I had heard that he’s very particular about his ingredients. This oil was not particularly animated in my opinion, so it lent little in terms of flavor to the pizza. Ah, but the mozzarella more than made up for that. It had a fresh milky creaminess to it and while beautifully melted, it still retained a little bit of texture to bite into. I really think it was the most delicious mozzarella I’ve ever tasted. So how does it compare to Chris Bianco’s pizza? It’s different. UPN’s crust has a more pronounced flavor while being a little more airy. Bianco’s crust has a better chew with a less assertive flavor. UPN’s crust and toppings all seem to retain their individuality allowing you to choose which element you want to focus on as you take each bite, but that individuality also meant that they never really all came together to create something more than the sum of their parts, which is exactly the intangible that Pizzeria Bianco achieves. I think it was the slightly different crust texture that allowed Bianco’s pizza to seem to bloom in flavor as you chewed it. Yes, you could still deconstruct Bianco’s pizza by nibbling a piece of sausage here, ripping off a piece of crust there, and in that way you could marvel at how amazing each element is, but when you take a whole bite with a little bit of topping and a bit of crust and you chew it, the Bianco pizza goes from sparkling to sublime. But don’t get me wrong, UPN is still a killer pizza. So good in fact that after I finished the margherita, I ordered a Marinara just to be sure it was still a kickass pizza without that remarkable mozzarella. And it definitely was still terrific even without the cheese. I would have considered ordering a third pizza just to see the reaction of my waitress, but I had to meet Kat and Rick at the theater. I think my work was done anyway, as the table next to me was certainly shocked by the little Asian guy wolfing down two whole pies while they were nibbling away at their solos.

As for the movie, Ratatouille was every bit as good as the reviews have hyped it up to be. I had read that Pixar had shadowed Thomas Keller in the kitchen for a stint in order to really nail the details of an actual restaurant kitchen, and I have to say, the result was just awesome. The realism of the layout, the movements of the chefs, the pace, the lingo and of course the actual cooking, all really seemed completely authentic. It was a funny and thoroughly entertaining film that just happened to be about my favorite topic. What a pleasant way to end my foodie Saturday!