November 11, 2006 / Perspective / The Brooklyn Angle

You call THAT a Brooklyn pie!

Domino’s new ‘Brooklyn’ pizza not fit for Kings

By Gersh Kuntzman

The Brooklyn Paper

The Brooklyn Papers / Julie Rosenberg

Front Street Pizza pizzaiolo Luis Calderone isn’t impressed by Domino’s Pizza’s new, tiny “Brooklyn Pizza.”

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You know what the main problem with Domino’s “Brooklyn-style” slice is? It stinks.

Sorry, that wasn’t a fittingly “Brooklyn-style” put-down. Domino’s new pie doesn’t merely stink. It freakin’ stinks like the Gowanus canal after a big rainstorm.

The Michigan-based chain unveiled its latest test-lab creation last week, running “dese,” “dose,” and “fuhgedaboudit”-filled commercials ad nauseum (ironically, a similar word can be used to describe the pizza).

The ad generated the usual hue and cry from the usual Defenders of Brooklyn — “We don’t tawk like dat!” said one Kings partisan — but complaints about the commercials ignore the substantive issue here: Domino’s is using the good name of Brooklyn to sell pizza you wouldn’t serve your worst enemy (except that jerk who used to beat you up in middle school).

But you don’t have to believe me (except about the beatings — they’re as real as the scars on my backside).

To judge the essential “Brooklyn-ness” of Domino’s “Brooklyn-style” pie, we ordered two of them to be delivered to Front Street Pizza, a DUMBO institution that is about as genuine a Brooklyn pizza shop as you can get.

And then we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Two hours after our first call — and after four additional calls — the “Brooklyn-style” pies showed up.

Strike one:

We Brooklynites don’t wait for pizza. Isn’t that why Tony Manero in “Saturday Night Fever” piles one slice on top of another rather than eat the two separately?

When they finally arrived, we let Front Street’s co-owner Larry Lombardi make the visual inspection.

“It’s tiny!” said Lombardi. “Are you sure this is a large?”

We checked the box. Yes, it was a large.

Lombardi’s large pie has an 18-inch diameter, four inches bigger than Domino’s. It may not sound like much, but if you calculate the area of the two circles (πr2), you find that Front Street gives you 100.48 square inches more pizza.

Strike two. Time to dig in.

“The dough is like a piece of bread, and it’s crumbly, so you can’t do the fold,” Lombardi said. Sure enough, as he folded the slice, it broke into three pieces.

“This is regular Domino’s crust. I really see no difference,” he added.

Strike three.

Luis Calderone, who is Lombardi’s main pizzaiolo, was “disgusted” by the cheese — which Domino’s says is a mozzarella-provolone blend.

“It’s horrible and there’s not enough of it, either,” he said.

Strike four.

Lombardi was amazed at how little sauce there was. After all, abbondanza is a Brooklyn tradition, ain’t it?

“How can you call it a Brooklyn slice with this little sauce and this little cheese?” he asked.

Strike five.

To be fair, I called Domino’s to see if there was a logical explanation for why the company was foisting this inferior pie on an unsuspecting nation. But I think spokeswoman Dana Harville misunderstood me (maybe it was my accent). She seemed to think I had come to praise the pie, not bury it.

“We’re always looking for good ideas and different flavor profiles to appeal to our customers,” Harville said. “We had the R&D team visit Brooklyn and get a feel for what that is. They did their best to recreate it. It met all the indicators in our test markets.”

Test marketed? The only way this pizza could pass such a test is if it was marketed on the Space Station.

Harville said she couldn’t tell me where it was test marketed — and she also declined to tell me how the “Brooklyn-style” slice is selling. (At least she learned one “Brooklyn-style” thing: omerta.)

But she did tell me the secret to why the crust is so lousy (not that she used that word).

All of the dough sold at the 8,238 Domino’s locations worldwide is churned out in 18 distribution centers and shipped at just-above-freezing temperatures to the local stores.

Strike six.

“It’s basically frozen dough,” said Lombardi. “That should be illegal.”

Of course, we’ve seen this sad culinary story before. The bagel was once a proud New York delicacy. But mass-producers started selling it nationwide, and the result is little more than a roll with a hole in it. Now you can barely get a real bagel in New York anymore.

But at least Dunkin’ Donuts doesn’t go around calling its rollwithahole the “Brooklyn Bagel.”

Oy, don’t give them any ideas.