Evviva Sal & Carmine's
Saluting a New York legend
It was after school and I was hungry. Maybe lunch had been tuna salad, or else pasta salad. Some things were not meant to be salad--this I knew. Now I was hungry for pizza. But not any pizza; that pizza. From the place around the corner.
Sal and Carmine’s was--still is--about twelve feet wide, maybe fourteen. Maybe. There was room for a single-file line to form (perpendicular to Broadway, parallel to the pizza counter), room for the ovens and the fridge filled with Dr Brown's Black Cherry and Cel Ray soda. Behind the counter, for years and years, you could count on one of two surly Neapolitans to preside. There was Sal, the blue-eyed one, and Carmine, the bald one. Relatives who'd left Campania in the 1950's. Neither was given to easy smiles or much talk, at least not with me. This was New York, after all. This was business. They worked long hours on their feet, day in day out, building pie by pie a reputation for some of the best pizza in the city. Which meant some of the best in the world. But in 1992 or thereabouts, recognition hadn't arrived, and even if it had, I didn't know about it. All I knew was I wanted some pizza.
Maronn', was it good. Salty and oily and somehow alchemical. The copious, high-grade grease was a kind of ambrosia, even if some were tempted to a cardinal sin: blotting it with a napkin. The cheese and the sauce melded in a divine union--none of this slumping, sliding cheese that you'd find at lesser joints. Sal's pizza was an organic whole, alchemical, a thing of beauty.
The foundation had to be the crust. Thin and crisp but chewy, too, and satisfying beyond reason. Blood could be spilt over the secrets of such crust. It managed to make other pizza seem like it was built on cardboard: insubstantial, tasteless. This crust was no dead backdrop but a living presence. You were eating something alive, something with history, lineage. Vesuvius rumbled through that crust.
I learned early on that you didn't get toppings at Sal's. Once in a blue moon maybe a sausage slice, if you really needed a double fat bomb (or balm). Mainly the toppings were afterthoughts, distractions from the purity of the thing itself. You got the sense Sal and Carmine wouldn't make toppings if the market didn't demand it, and regulars knew better than to gild the lily. No. You got your slice (“slice, please” or "let me get a slice") still bubbling from the oven, if you were lucky--and you walked out onto Broadway, cradling heaven on a paper plate.
Or you took it to the little dining area at the back. The square footage of an average NYC bedroom, this room had rough brick walls all the way up to the pressed-tin ceiling high above. Like in a cathedral, most of the space was above you. Down below, seven or eight little tables were squeezed in for us mortals.
Decor: two enormous vintage French advertisements in the same hand-painted style, one a Dior cologne advertisement with a towel-draped nude man, the other for DD chaussettes: "La qualité revient à la mode." Quality's back in style. Several paintings of toucans on another wall, randomly. That was it. Nothing else to distract you from the communion at hand.
I must have averaged something like two or three slices a week over a ten-year period. At lunchtime or slipping in right before closing after an evening out. By myself, with a friend, a date. I brought everyone to Sal's, sharing the good news. More than any other single food, I'm quite literally made of Sal and Carmine's pizza. Crust, sauce, cheese are woven into my DNA, tethering me to 101st and Broadway (and from there back to Naples).
After I left for college, I'd do my best to make up for lost time on visits home, often stopping at Sal's for a slice straight off the subway, luggage and all, before heading up to the apartment. (This experience is common among Sal's devotees, judging by the comments on the Sal's entry on the Pizza Hall of Fame). Speaking of fame, the awards did start rolling in around the time of my conversion. Best Slice in NYC '93. Time Out New York's Best Pizza 1994, and so on. Plaques and articles adorned the walls. Nothing else changed, thankfully. Sal and Carmine were gruff as ever, toppings as superfluous, grease as plentiful.
Sal passed on at some point and passed the keys to the castle to his grandson, Luciano. Carmine must have retired. Sometime in the mid 2000's or so, the parrots and toucans came down; more recently an Alitalia logo went up (sentimental touch), along with some Italian language travel magazines in a little wall rack. That's about it for changes. The chausettes ad still presides, as does the quality that never goes out of style.
Granted, on one visit a couple of years ago, it seemed there was too much cheese, that the pie could have used another minute in the oven. The young bloods were slipping, I thought: this was the beginning of the end. But my most recent visit restored my faith. Not because of the new toppings they're doing now (white pie? irrelevant). Because the foundation is intact. The grease is unblotted and the line unbroken.
Every other storefront on Broadway between 101st and 102nd has turned over once, twice, three or more times since the mid 90's. Come and gone are the Indian restaurant (Gandhi-ji), the Supercuts, the old liquor store, the French bistro, the Korean grocers, the cheap luggage shop. Only Sal's abides, serving up alchemical pie to another generation of New Yorkers, reminding them that some things in this world are sacred.
