I've never had it
When I was photographing the Koop House on Rugby Road I was close to DiFara's Pizza on Avenue J.
$4 for a slice? Is it worth it? This reviewer (the chowhound) thought the pizza was great, but criticized the way the shop was run (an excerpt):
DiFara's ripped by Rosengarten, Pizza with a Smile.....or Not, FILED: January 16, 2007: Way back in January, 2002, I published a piece in The Rosengarten Report about New York City pizza—classifying the different types, as well as identifying the very best pizzerias in the five boroughs. I found my #1 "classic New York pizza" at a very old, very small pizza parlor in the heart of Brooklyn called Di Fara, run by Domenic De Marco. "Virtually no one outside of the neighborhood knows about this place," I wrote, "so hurry here please, before De Marco does something sensible like retire."
If you read that piece, I hope you took my advice. Five years later, De Marco is a superstar to a much, much wider public. He has not retired. He is still around, receiving accolades on a regular basis from all quarters; the 2007 Zagat Survey, for example, calls Di Fara pizza "da best pizza in Noo Yawk," and nary a freshly researched New York pizza story fails to agree. (The current issue of New York magazine calls De Marco "the last of the old pizza masters.")
Having not been back to Di Fara since all this happened, I thought it was high time I got myself over to Avenue J to see how the old maestro has handled the boom.....and to see whether you should put this place on your itinerary. I set out from Manhattan on a warm, sunny, jacket-less Saturday in January, my spirits buoyed by the unusual weather.
As I approached Di Fara, at about 3:45 PM, I caught my first glimpse of The Modern Disaster: lines pouring out onto the once-tranquil street. The good news: The people in line were not freezing. The bad news: They were confused and surly.
I saw two lines on the sidewalk: one had about 6 people and led to a window outside the store, the other line had about 10 people and led directly to the counter inside the store. Not knowing quite what to make of the two lines, or which one to join—and with no signs or indications—I took a guess, asking someone on the "window" line if this line was for take-out. "That would be a good guess," the waiting girl told me. "That's what we thought. But it's not. You can take out from either line."
All right. Fair enough. "So what's the difference between the two lines?" I asked. She pointed at the longer line, the one going in the door, and said "that one's faster." Hmmmm. Interesting.
Couldn't help myself. "If that one's faster," I gently asked, "how come you're on this line?" At that point a sweatshirt-clad ex-hippie of a certain age in front of her turned abruptly to me and said: "because we're idiots."
Allrighty. This guy either originally came to us from hell, or, perhaps, waiting on a slow line for a slice of 'za nudged him in a demonic direction. I needed more info. Exactly how long had he been waiting?
I cannot answer that queston, but I can tell you this: I got on the counter line, the longer one......and, other than a lot of tile-counting, nothing happened for 30 minutes except the capture of a few centimeters. That's not a typo—thirty minutes.
What I observed was this. The old guy, De Marco, was making every single pizza by hand (normally a good thing!). After obsessing about the placement of the dough on the pizza paddle, and all the other details, he might—if toppings were ordered—disappear into the back room for two or three minutes to pick up a handful of mushrooms.
Very occasionally, the only other worker in the place, De Marco's son, would stride from the back room with a handful of mushrooms or sausage.
So.....including the making of the pie, the placement of the pizza in the oven (sometimes requiring a stepladder), the removal, the final grating of cheese on the cooked pie (for which the cheese is grated pie-by-pie, as the pies come out of the oven), the final placement of fresh basil leaves on each pie (for which the basil is snipped pie-by-pie by scissors set on the other side of the store), and the final drizzle of olive oil (which, blessedly, is only a few feet behind De Marco's finishing spot).....the total labor time (not including cooking) for each pie is probably a good 4-5 minutes. Hey, artisanal makes me happy! And you may want to trek to Brooklyn to see this dinosaur operation!
But here's what one disorganized man taking 4-5 minutes per pie does to a line of 30 people. After about half an hour of waiting, I started counting pies in the oven like a card shark counts aces at the casino during blackjack. I was able to pretty much identify who in line was waiting for each pie—except for De Marco's mistakes, which were many.
At about that time (30 minutes), De Marco looked up at the guy at the front of the line and said "what do you want?" The guy kept his cool pretty well, but said "I already ordered a pie, half mushroom, half pepperoni." De Marco said nothing, but turned around and started making a pie.....half mushrooms, half pepperoni.
Because that guy was in line before I arrived, I'm guessing he had given his order at least 35 minutes earlier, and that it had taken him 30-50 minutes in line before he gave his order the first time. So, after waiting at least an hour, maybe closer to an hour and a half, he now had to put his order in a second time and continued to wait for his pie.
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