Martellucci's Pizza
1419 Easton Avenue |
|
We're back, Lehigh, for another year of drips and droops, punning and panning, cheesy and straight talk about pizza. This year we are throwing down the gauntlet (i.e., knightly potholder glove) to challenge the Lehigh community. We want you to help us find the best pizza in the vast Lehigh Valley (home of the international airport of the same name). We will take our undergraduate and graduate student guests far and wide to validate the primo pizza in the entire Wild & Wacky Walley (and subsequently, via the Appian Way, we'll include the greater galaxy). So, send us your tasteful nominations to pizzaprofs@yahoo.com.
For our season opener, we asked the local cogniscenti in the wholly (i.e., unsliced) city of Bethlehem. Word from native informants was Martellucci's Pizza -- a favorite hangout for purported flocks of Crows (a.k.a. AXRho). Each of those fine-feathered friends is reputed to eat an individual "Extra Large 19"-Pizza." We wondered whether Martellucci's would measure up to their motto on the cover of their menu, "Real Italian Food Fresh Dough Made Daily" (and thus be Crow-eating) or instead would merely be a high SI (scarfability index) scorer (and thus be akin to eating crow).
We brought along some well-seasoned experts. Representing the graduate-student cohort was Colin "Threw Dough" Saunders, who is from Toronto, Canada, and who has worked in a pizza house and worked as a sous chef in French and Italian restaurants. We chose Colin in light of not only his culinary experience but also his nary-cool chutzpah; he sent us his "pizza vitae" during the summer. Representing the undergraduate population were Vlatka "Vikki" Tomazic, '99, who is an expert in pizza in Croatia, where they serve only individual personal pies, and Lauren Allu, '99, who is from an Italian neighborhood in Jersey, where every pizza house make its own sauce from scratch.
Martellucci's, we discovered, has two basic tomato sauces for its pies, canned and home grown as evidenced by the tomatoes we spotted on the kitchen's window sill. We ordered both types, with the first round being the customary one regular cheese and the other half-mushroom, half-pepperoni with the canned sauce, and the second round, thanks to Christina's attentive service, with the fresh tomato. In response to Vikki's request for a lemon in her glass of diet Coke (perhaps another Croatian creation), kind Christina brought a plate of sliced lemons for the table. According to our lemon aide, those of "ewes" (her term, with a sheepish grin) who are of proper age can BYOB at Martellucci's.
As for the pies, Colin's first comment was that they were "beeeautiful" (and dem ain't no corn flakes, Tony). Explaining his aesthetic exclamation, he continued: "They look like the kind of pizza you see in the movies. After letting the pie cool for exactly one tad (which is the correct hang time for scarfer dudes), we tested for droops and drips. Martellucci's crust was firm and crunchy, with no sag (a.k.a. pendulosity) and nary a drop of grease (a.k.a. lardosity). This is a low napkin-user's place.
Next the taste. Laura and Vikki particularly liked the cheese, but Perry and I were puzzled when Laura used "cheesy" as the complimentary mot juste. Colin opined that his slice started with a distinctive flavor that was not as powerful in later bites, which he praised as a palate-pleasing progression. We hypothesized that that Kevin (Carmine in Kevlar), the pizza maker, purposefully put the oregano in the center as his distinctive trademark. But Paul Biondo, the boss's son and grandson of the original Martellucci, disabused us of our Rome-antic notion, explaining that when Kevin is in a hurry, he just throws the oregano on willy-nilly (which, coincidentally, are the names of the remaining spice girls, or was it Millie and Vanillie?). Too bad. Fickle flicking rather than a new twist to the art of pizza making.
You might think that we would have preferred the homemade tomato sauce but, as an overall group, we gave the nod to the canned version. Vikki skewed our original, fresh thinking with her insightful comment: "[The homemade variety] didn't make my mouth happy." We also judged the fresh sauce to be a bit wet compared to the archetypal the flaky fresh sauce from Alpha Pizza Pi, which received our top rating of "7 slices" last year. The mushrooms were also canned but, paradoxically, we liked them with the canned sauce! Perhaps it was Paul's cand-id comments: "Mushrooms are not a big topping for our clientele, and we can't stay up all night making two kinds of sauce." The pepperoni was the standard -- very thin slice, which blended in nicely with the cheese.
With only 5 tasters, we decided to average all ratings rather than resort to Olympic scoring. Laura gave a 6; Colin, a 7; Vikki a 5,but when she said that she liked Papa John's pizza, Perry raised his score from a 7 to a 7.5 in defense of the hometown pizzeria against the homogenizing chozzerai (see Leo Rosten, Joys of Yiddish) of the big chains. (Can you imagine, a local Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce recommended that we try their Pizza Hut.) I gave a 6.5. The overall result was our first half-slice rating of 6.5, which ranks Martellucci's number 2 out of the 7 pizza establishments that we have taste tested.
After our rating raiding, Paul Biondo gave us a tour of his kitchen. We met Kevin, the young but talented pizza maker. We also viewed the stuffed coyote out on the back porch; such ambiance is an added attraction of Martelluci's. For a bonus treat, the Cup, Bethlehem's famous ice cream stand, is just around the corner for a cool ending to a cheesy evening. Hi, Cholesterol. Bye, Carbonate.
Reviewed by:
Ron Yoshida, Dean of the College of Education
Perry Zirkel, Iacocca Professor of Education
Colin Saunders, graduate student in Educational Technology;
Vikki Tomazic, '99, psychology
Lauren Allu, '99, psychology
Martelluci's, 1419 Easton Avenue
(go over the New Street Bridge to
Center, make a right turn on Elizabeth to Linden, take the diagonal
left turn on to Easton)
(610) 865-2013.
Open seven days a week; call
for hours (but not for ours).
This review originally appeared in The Brown and White at Lehigh University in September, 1998.