Lucali, New York
Don't heed the hype
Lucali is, without a doubt, one of the most acclaimed pizza places in New York City. It’s also pretty average.
A visit to any hyped restaurant is always a flirtation with disappointment, of course. Acclaim has diminishing returns, and so a lot more buzz has a tendency to correlate with just a little more quality. That’s what I thought about L’Industrie, one of the city’s other modern favourites — it served excellent pizza, perhaps the best take I’ve had yet on the classic New York slice, but as a colleague of mine put it, it’s only three percent better than the next best around. Trekking halfway across the city (or the planet) and queuing for hours to have a meal that’s merely very good is bound to underwhelm just a little.
Lucali didn’t underwhelm just a little.
I’ve had Lucali on my radar ever since it, and chef Mark Iacono, appeared in the first episode of David Chang’s Ugly Delicious. Iacono played the pizza traditionalist, turning his nose up at Domino’s and Japanese-inflected toppings and celebrating Italian flavours — a dangerous game perhaps, given his crispy pizzas wouldn’t pass muster with Naples’ even more demanding gatekeepers.
The cash-only Carroll Gardens spot is notoriously difficult to get into. If you’re not Taylor Swift, your best bet is to turn up mid-afternoon and stand in line for an hour or two. They start taking names for the waitlist around 4pm, so if you’re lucky you’ll be able to put yours down and come back a few hours later. We went on a Monday, queued for an hour to get on the list, and snagged a 7pm table. It’s a great system if you’re a tourist willing to give up an afternoon in the name of dinner; not so great if you’re a local with a day job, which is why Lucali sits near the centre of New York’s lucrative line sitting economy.
The menu, once you’re actually at a table, is reassuringly short: pizza, calzone, and an off-menu pasta that’s only off-menu in the sense that they didn’t write it on the sign, but our waitress still listed it when describing our options. It’s not a bad plate of pasta, though I’m afraid I couldn’t take it seriously because it tastes exactly like the Tesco tomato and mascarpone sauce I was fed frequently as a child, which at £2 a tub is much better value.
The calzone is better. It comes in small or large, with flat and blackened pizza dough encompassing a morass of cheese, generously strewn with basil leaves and accompanied by marinara sauce on the side. There’s no puff and only little chew to Lucali’s thin dough, but it works as a simple vehicle for a puddle of hot formaggio, and the steam helps keep the insides soft and just a little bready.
The same can’t be said for the pizza itself. Here the thin-stretched dough arrives crisp and dry, its edges close to crackers. It’s bland too — against my every adult instinct I eventually revert to childish ways and stop bothering to eat the crusts as I go, with simply no pleasure to be had from them. Good pizza starts with good bread, and at Lucali that’s simply lacking.
A bad dough can sometimes be salvaged by quality toppings, and they do help here, though not enough. Short of the basil — which is fresh, pungent, and provided in extravagant quantities — nothing here truly stands out. It’s all create-your-own, so some responsibility falls on those ordering to nail the combinations, but the best ingredients will make themselves known regardless. Nothing here is actually bad, but even the marinara and mozzarella prove pretty forgettable.
For all the food’s faults, Lucali does have a great vibe. It’s buzzy and busy, its candlelit interior complemented by a handful of outside tables stretching across the sidewalk. But the hype hurts a little here too — with so much demand for tables, turnover time is aggressive, and you’ll be lucky if you can hold your table for 90 minutes before they’re hurrying you out the door.
In Lucali’s defence, its thin, crispy, crunchy pizza just isn’t my style, meaning I was never likely to fall head over heels for it. I still fall for the flop of a simple Neapolitan margherita, or the bouncy, doughy slabs of a Sicilian-style slice, and Lucali is simply going for something different. I hesitated writing this piece for that exact reason, worried I might just not have a taste for the technique, no ability to appreciate it.
It was another pizza that changed my mind, though not one I ate in New York. Last week I finally made the trek to London’s Crisp, in deepest, darkest Hammersmith, to try their pizza before they make the move to Marylebone and everyone inevitably starts claiming it’s not as good as it once was. Like Lucali, Crisp is the most talked about pizza in the city, and it shares both a byzantine ordering system (in this case, pizza preorders that open each week on Monday morning, but only guarantee you the food, not a table to eat it at), and a thin base that puts crunch over chew. It’s still not my style, but I loved it all the same: a base that shatters just slightly with every bite, a bright and vibrant marinara, lashings of salty pecorino. Much like L’Industrie, it’s probably just three percent better than London’s other great pizzerias, but that makes it a whole lot better than Lucali.
