Jump Club

OK, this is a joke, right? I'm reviewing pizza from Jump Club, a kids' indoor playground-cum-game arcade? Is is April Fools Day already?
Well, look. I went there, and I had pizza, so why not review it? Maybe I can help some other parents facing a decision of whether and what to eat while their child literally bounces off the walls at Jump Club.
I had off from work on Martin Luther King Day, so my wife and I took our 9-year-old daughter to Jump Club.We joined a few other parents in the small dining area adjacent to the "cafe," while our daughter and the other kids climbed, jumped, and bounced off the walls and each other in the play area.
Eventually I started to get hungry, so I sauntered over to the food counter, where I could choose from the usual suspects at these kinds of places:  nachos, burgers, hot dogs, popcorn, and, yes, pizza.

Hunger will drive just about any animal to eat that which he would ordinarily pass up, and so it was with me. You're not allowed to bring outside food or drink into Jump Club, and, if you want pizza at least, that's with good reason. Otherwise, you'd probably grab a slice at Mark's next door. I'm not the biggest fan of Mark's, but I would've much preferred a slice from there.
Not that this was awful. But it wasn't great, and it was overpriced. I frankly don't recall the exact price, but I believe it was over $3. What I do remember is thinking, right after I bought it, that I would never buy a slice of pizza here again.
One thing that annoyed me, too, was that the person behind the counter simply took the next slice from the pie, which also happened to be the smallest slice. Ideally, of course, all the slices will be the same size, but it doesn't always work that way. To me, it's an unwritten rule that if I get a single slice, and some slices are noticeably bigger than others, the person serving me should choose a larger slice. It may mean that somebody's going to get stuck with the smallest slice in the end, but my corollary to that rule is that by the time you get down to the last slice, a new, fresh pie should be available, and you start serving from that pie. That last, little slice from the earlier pie doesn't get served. That goes to the staff's lunch. That may be a completely unreasonable idea that's only a rule in my mind, but what can I say? That's how I feel about it.
So between the price and the diminutive size of my slice, I probably wasn't in the best mood by the time I took my first bite. But I'd like to think that I still had an open mind, as far as the pizza was concerned.
The crust was not terrible, but it wasn't terribly good, either. The underside was dry, which was good - in other words, it wasn't oily - and it had noticeably risen along the edge. But the dimpled bottom (clearly it had been baked on a perforated pan) wasn't crisp at all, and it was very unevenly stretched. Near the tip, the crust was quite thin, and toward the edge it ballooned into a very thick, and wide, band of dough, which was bubbly despite the "docking" (tiny perforations) and which caused the cheese to migrate toward the center of the pie.
That in turn caused the sauce on the denuded outer half of the slice to evaporate, which left behind some color and a dehydrated, tomatoey flavor but almost no moisture. The cheese, meanwhile, was basic aged mozzarella, but it was well browned and had lost its suppleness and stringiness.
Having said all that, well, this wasn't an awful slice of pizza. Maybe it's a testament to how hard it is to truly screw up the combination of dough, tomato sauce and cheese, which as near-perfect a culinary combination as mankind has yet devised. But this was flawed in several respects, and certainly below average for a Rochester-area slice of pizza. It gets a D from me.
Jump Club, 3450 Winton Place, Rochester, NY 14623 — (585) 730-8900
Open Daily 10 am - 8 pm (closed many holidays - check their website for details)

Book Review: Back of the House

While the concept of selling prepared food to customers probably dates back at least as far as the ancient Romans, the modern restaurant is generally thought to have originated in late 18th-century France. Over the ensuing centuries, the restaurant has mutated into many different forms, from the humble "family" restaurant to the world-class places that most of us will never set foot in.
Somewhere along the line, the chef went from being merely "a skilled cook who manages the kitchen" - Webster's definition - to a celebrity in his or her own right, who rarely gets involved anymore in the act of cooking. 
Television and other mass media undoubtedly contributed to this trend, inasmuch as they have caused an explosion of our consumerist and celebrity culture. Undoubtedly, most Americans remain unaffected by this phenomenon, and don't care who's doing the cooking as long as the fries are hot and crisp. For some of us, though (and I don't count myself among them) it's no longer enough to go to a great restaurant - you have to see, if not have your meal prepared by, the chef, who's the real star of the show. Those of us who can't afford it, but who are still intrigued by the celebrity-chef culture, will make do with TV shows featuring said chefs, frozen meals bearing their names, and perhaps an occasional visit to restaurants nominally run by them in vacation spots like Orlando and Las Vegas.
The apotheosis of the chef has had the ironic effect of distancing many chefs from the ostensible reason for their fame:  the food. It's hard to get much cooking done when you're busy running a restaurant empire. And it's also led to the elevation to chef status of people who probably don't know much more about cooking than you or I do, but whose looks and personalities are more telegenic than ours (or mine, anyway).
But there are still great, dedicated chefs out there, and one of them is the focus of Back of the House:  The Secret Life of a Restaurant, by Scott Haas. Haas, who, interestingly, is both a food writer and a clinical psychologist, spent a year and a half in the kitchen - or wherever else he wanted to go - of Craigie on Main, a Boston restaurant headed by James Beard Award-winner Tony Maws. Maws gave Haas virtually unlimited access to all areas and employees of the restaurant, allowing him to observe the dynamics of running a successful, high-end restaurant, and to get to know the employees both as individuals and as part of a team.
At least, the ideal is that they would operate as a team. Haas repeatedly comments upon the dysfunctional nature of the staff at Craigie on Main, a problem that he lays at the feet of Chef Maws. As Haas sees it, Maws is a culinary visionary, with his own, unique concepts about food, but Maws never seems able to transmit those ideas to his staff, or willing to trust them with executing what he has in mind. The result is high turnover, frustrated employees, and frequent outbursts of anger from Maws, interspersed with periods - or at least moments - when the kitchen is hitting on all cylinders, like a well-oiled machine. In the end, despite all the difficulties, it's clear that for many of the players in this drama, Craigie on Main is a de facto family, albeit an exceptionally screwed-up one. 
Back of the House was a quick, and mostly entertaining read, but at times I found myself wondering what the point of it all was. I can't say that it's an insider's guide about what "really" goes on in a restaurant kitchen, because the idiosyncratic nature of Craigie on Main means that what went on during the year and a half that Haas spent there was to a great extent unique to that restaurant. As Haas himself notes, he realized early on that "Tony's story was unique."
But looking at Back of the House as simply the story of one particular restaurant, during one particular stretch of time, I'm not sure that the story was compelling enough to carry the book. I ended up with a good sense of what life and work were like at this one restaurant, but I wasn't sure why I was supposed to care. 
The one thing that seemed to propel Haas was his quest to understand what motivated Maws. Maybe that's a product of Haas's background in psychology, but he seemed driven to figure out what makes Maws tick, why he chose to become a chef, and why he runs the restaurant the way that he does. I found Haas's analysis generally interesting, but again, I never quite became as fully invested in the subject as Haas himself obviously was.
One thing I did take away from the book was a sense of how intense and serious the restaurant business can be. I've never read Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, but I've read enough about it to know that it contains passages of drugs, sex and general debauchery. You'll find none - well, almost none - of that here; at one point in the book, an employee struggles with a heroin addiction, and sex comes up only tangentially, when two of the employees become romantically involved, which does not sit well with Maws. But the business of the kitchen, as recorded in Back of the House, is all business, which tells us something, I suppose, about the changed culture of today compared with the drug-soaked era in which Bourdain came of age, as well as the highly competitive, money-driven nature of the restaurant business, at the stratospheric level at which a place like Craigie on Main operates. When customers are routinely dropping hundreds of dollars for a single meal, which they expect to be among the finest available on the planet, there's no room and no tolerance for back-room shenanigans, of any kind.
While I love good food, I can't call myself a true "foodie," and at times Maas's chef- and restaurant-namedropping (Wylie Dufresne, Heston Blumenthal, L'Espalier, Chez Panisse, to name a few), and his casual use of esoteric food terms (yuzu, cotechino) left me feeling like one of the clueless diners at Craigie on Main who are there because they've heard it's good, but who frankly don't get it, and who reflexivlely order the one thing on the menu they've heard of and feel comfortable with - the hamburger (which drives Chef Maws to such distraction that he ends up taking it off the main menu). 
But the mark of a good book is that you want to keep reading it, and I did. I got to know, vicariously, Maws and several members of his staff, and I wanted to know where things would end up. Would Maws's autocratic, unpredictable ways prove his undoing, or would the staff finally learn how to work together? And while I didn't learn any great, hitherto secret bits of arcane knowledge about the restaurant business, I did come away with more respect and appreciation for the sheer work that goes on to put an attractive, palate-pleasing plate of food on my table when I dine out.

New York City!

I was in New York City for two nights this week, and though it may be needless to say, I lived on nothing but pizza the entire time. (Well, OK, I did have a muffin one morning at the hotel's free continental breakfast, and a bag of potato chips. But otherwise, pizza.) I didn't go to any of the city's legendary pizzerias, like Patsy's, Grimaldi's, or DiFara, nor did I hit any of the new wave of artisanal pizzerias, like Co. (which according to its website is pronounced "company" - that's how you know it's cool and hip), Keste, or Motorino. Partly that's because many of them only sell whole pies, and being alone and wanting to try as many places as I could, that just wouldn't work. I can only eat so much pizza in one stretch. Patsy's, which I love, sells slices, but it's way up at 118th St., which is a long way to go for a slice or two. And I just didn't feel like enduring an hour or more wait for a $5 slice at DiFara in Brooklyn.
But I did try to hit some places that I'd read good stuff about. I'm not going to do a full review of every slice I had - there are other good sites out there covering NYC pizza, and I couldn't even scratch the surface of the city's offerings - but I'll give a quick rundown of some of what I had. The order of the photos coincides with that of the written descriptions.
Bleecker Street Pizza, 69 7th Ave. - a wall-full of celebrity photos don't necessarily guarantee good food, but these were very fine slices, crisp and flavorful. And with their browned but not blackened crusts, they showed that even classic NY style pizza doesn't have to be charred to be good.
Saluggi's, 325 Church St. - the best slice I had the whole trip. This is a restaurant, not a slice joint, and my slice took at least 5 minutes, maybe 10, after my order, to come out. I was getting impatient and thinking that if I'd known how long it was going to take, I would've skipped it. But that would've been a big mistake. This was outstanding pizza.
I did get an idea that I might be in for a treat while waiting for my slice, watching fresh pies emerge from the oven, literally steaming. That's thanks to the house-made fresh mozzarella, which was incredibly smooth and creamy.
Saluggi's is not a name I've seen mentioned a lot on pizza websites (though there's a good description here), which maybe speaks to the overall level of quality of NY pizza, but it deserves a spot on your go-to list if you're in the Tribeca neighborhood. The silky cheese was beautifully balanced by the rich tomato sauce and just-heated basil leaves. The underside was charred and crackly. Near perfection. And all I'd asked for was a cheese slice. I'd love to go back, with family or friends, for a full pie or two.
Big Al's Chicago Style Pizza, 9 Thames St. - I had to walk through some construction to get here, but I'd read a positive review here. Despite the name, this place sells a wide variety of NY style, thin crust pizza, although they do offer Chicago style pan pizza slices as well. (I should mention here that although some of the pizzerias I went to had thick-crust, Sicilian pizza available, which is actually pretty common in NYC, I stuck with the thin stuff. I like Sicilian, but on this trip I wanted to stay as much as I could with basic, NY (or neo-Neapolitan, if you prefer) thin-crust pizza. This was OK, but not exceptional. My cheese slice had a visible layer of orange oil on top, which I let drip off as much as I could. The bottom was crisscrossed by scrren marks, but was pretty crisp, although the flakes of burnt cheese and the overly blackened edge detracted from it somewhat.
Hungry for a slice on Wednesday night, I passed up two pizzerias that had no customers, and went into the third, Artichoke, which had a short line. That may or may not be indicative of a place's quality, but this was good pizza, with a slightly thicker crust than many other NYC pizzerias', and that again-heavenly blend of sauce, islands of melted fresh mozzarella, and basil. The underside was dark brown, not quite charred, but crisped from its brief reheating in the oven.
The last photo comes from Joe's, another celebrity-photo place; pics of Conan O'Brien and Val Kilmer with the owner stared down at me as I ate my slice.
Having enjoyed that fresh mozzarella-tomato sauce combination at other places, I opted for that here as well, but that was a mistake, in hindsight. The pie my slice came from was down to its last two or three slices, indicating that it had been sitting there for a while, and I would've been better off getting a regular (processed mozzarella) cheese slice from the pie of that type that had just emerged from the oven. My slice was OK, but a bit too thin for my taste. It also made me realize that fresh mozzarella is best eaten freshly baked - the reheating turned this cheese slightly brown, and it lacked the semiliquid texture that sets fresh mozzarella apart from the processed stuff.
Although I have no photos, I want to mention the last pizza I ate on my trip. As I mentioned, I don't care to pay $5 for a slice at DiFara (although I'd do it if I were in the neighborhood and the line was reasonably short), but I did end up buying a $5 slice - two, in fact. Where? At LaGuardia Airport. Airports are kind of like sports stadiums - you're part of a captive audience, so if you're hungry or thirsty enough, you'll shell out ridiculous amounts of money for your food and drink. My slices were OK, but the crusts were too floppy. After I got them, at a walk-up counter, I spotted a sit-down place called Crust, which is, sort of, associated with bread guru (and Co. owner) Jim Lahey. But I already had two slices, and they only sell whole pies, and I figured they probably weren't world-class anyway, so I skipped it.
It's possible to get mediocre, even bad pizza in New York City. (I spotted several $1-slice places, none of which looked worth stopping at, from what I saw of their pies.) And there are pizzerias in and around Rochester that can hold their own anywhere. But New York is a true mecca for pizza. Maybe it's the pizza culture there, stemming from its history of Italian immigration, and maybe it's partly the sheer amount of pizza competition, but the bar is very high. Again, the places I stopped at would not be on many Top 10 lists of NYC pizzerias, although they did generally come well recommended by somebody. But there wasn't a bad slice in the bunch. It's probably a good thing I don't live there, as I think I would feel overwhelmed by the abundance of pizza riches around me. But it's great living within striking distance of the city, for an occasional foray.