Motorino and My Four Tenets of Pizzaness

Motorino Pizza - 319 Graham Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 718-599-8899

After watching Spain destroy the Dutch , 1-0, in the highest scoring sporting event in history (clearly I wrote this entry months ago), Danielle and I walked from Matt Torrey’s elegantish sports bar to the Williamsburg version of Mathieu Palombino's Motorino for some pizza. We sat right by their oven, one of those giant brick ones with wood inside it. You can like, see the fire. It was burning.

We ordered a tomato salad (amazingly fresh slices of yellow and red tomatoes salted properly, with fresh basil laying on them and a bit of olive oil drizzled in good proportion. Not drenched.)

For pizza, we ordered the 14-incher with the fresh, buffalo mozzarella, figuring it would be just big enough. It definitely was. (That's what SHE said.)

Here’s the thing about this pizza: It had that burnt look and taste, which I love, but Danielle doesn’t. A lot of people don’t love it, in fact, and I have to admit that the burntness overpowered everything just a smidgen too much, even for my perfect taste buds. I noticed other pizzas coming out of the oven were charred relatively similarly. I wouldn’t call these pizzas your basic thin crusters because the edge of the crust had gigantic bubbles, something you won’t always get at John’s, Lombardi’s, Grimaldi’s, Patsy’s, or any of those other thin slice havens. There was, in general, more crust on Motorino’s pizza (a little like Lucali, which I'll post about soon).

The pie is cut into four gigantic slices (As shown in this photo of the pepperoni pie I stole from Motorino's Web site) and let me tell you, the cheese was so so so fresh that I don’t know I’ve ever had better cheese on a pizza in my life. That’s how good it was.

The sauce – and I’m a believer that if your pizza is good, you don’t need a lot of sauce – was JUST enough. It didn’t overpower the cheese, and it shouldn’t have. The obvious leaves of fresh basil made for quite an excellent coupla slices. Also, one thing that even some great pizza places do horribly is not know how to perfectly salt the top of the crust – the part not covered by cheese or sauce – with REALLY GOOD salt. No such problem at Motorino. It was salted wonderfully.

Real quick, for the sake of this blog that will probably have more than one posting about pizza, I must announce my four tenets of pizzaness. If you find yourself disagreeing with me for some reason, maybe this can be a guide as to why:

1. Pizza in New York is like sex anywhere: Even when it’s bad, it’s good. It’s tough to get a really bad grade on pizza even if you’re Famous Semi-Original Ray’s On 84th Street. That’s what makes it perhaps the toughest food to analyze. It’s something that can be done reasonably well by anyone – I can make good-tasting pizza four different ways in my own regular oven – but exceptionally well by only a few. You remember great sex, and you remember great pizza.

2. If I’m ordering pizza from a reasonably prominent place, I’m always going to try their most basic pie first. That’s the only way to go. Things like sausage or pepperoni or even fresh vegetables can skew the taste – good or bad – and I don’t want that. It’s the pizza, stupid.

3. Too much sauce on pizza, or any Italian food in general, is a sign of some sort of over-compensation, like blindly pouring buckets of parmesan cheese on everything from your stromboli to your wine glass. Socially awkward people want to seem more comfortable to others. So they drown themselves in the sauce. Subpar pizzas try not to show off their bubbly little warts, either. So they too drown themselves in the sauce.

4. The same goes for too much cheese, too much of a garlic taste (I love garlic, but not so much garlic that I can’t kiss anyone for 7 months.).

Perfection Ratings: Motorino

What’s Closest to Perfect? The cheese, the sauce/cheese proportion.

What’s Furthest From Perfect? Just a bit too burnt of a flavor, overpowers some of the good things about the pie.

How’s the atmosphere? It’s airy, and windowy, and you can see the oven, there’s a modern-looking bar. A big loud family came when we were about to leave, and they just set up one gigantic long table and accommodated them well. There’s also a big chalkboard with the beer list, which has some great local brews from Red Hook, etc. I like chalkboards.

Does my search for the perfect pizza end or continue? continues