Penn Pizza 455 North New Street (610) 866-3532

Well, Lehigh, it's time that we went across, although not up, the river. Although they don't do delivery, the Ricci family, who own Penn Pizza, do "deliver" in the sense of providing a rather crispy pie that's worth the short trip to 455 No. New Street. And, you can make a night of it by taking in a movie at the classic theater, "The Boyd." Using our SOP (standard operating procedure) of two guest reviewers, one undergraduate and one graduate student, and two pizzas, one plain and the other with pre-selected toppings, we visited Penn Pizza on a recent Monday night.

The dining area in the front was limited and the one on the side, smoky, but Mrs. Ricci, who didn't have any reason to suspect that we were the Gene & Roger et al. of the pizza world, insisted on opening the comfortable rear dining room for our culinary pleasure. Just like home. Similarly, Mr. Ricci, adeptly hearing Ron's remark that he liked anchovies (thumbs down in my menu), went out of his way to put some of those wiggly things on two slices of our plain pie. Illustrative of their extra care, the Riccis added the anchovies after the pie was baked, rather than making the common mistake of disbursing them on the way to the oven and thus melting them into the cheese like salty Sicilian trematodes (flat worms). The atmosphere is trusting, with self-service from a wide variety of soft drinks and beer. However, the lack of prices on the menu was a bit disquieting for those of us raised and calcified in Big City surroundings.

The pizza, which is our leit motif with force majeur, was, in senior Mike Davis' straight talk, "pretty good." More specifically, we gave Penn Pizza an overall average of six slices out of eight. Ron, who is a tougher grader than his friendly manner would suggest, and Mike, whose solid credentials include having made deliveries for two years from Bambino's Pizza in Pine Brook, New Jersey, were impressed with the rather crispy crust and chewy "edge." Doctoral student, Sharon Lohrmann, who makes pizza at home with such special paraphernalia as a baking stone and yeast jar, leaned toward a five-slice rating based on greasiness, but she admitted that the source was whole-milk mozzarella and that she doesn't know of a pizza place could meet her picky, home-based, virtually oil- (and meat-) free standards. Spoiled and biased from frequenting the brick-oven havens in New Haven, I proposed a 5.5 rating, but Ron said half slices get too messy, and the Roman tradition is, like Sharon's stone, to round upward.

As to other particulars, the sauce was unobtrusive (translated by Mike as "missing something"), and the cheese was abundante. The mushrooms were fresh, although not generous in size or number. The sausage was more plentiful but, according to my urban-urbane, pizza-maven colleague, "lacking in Fennel" (which, I gather, is one of the Spice Girls). The dough, at first, didn't pass Ron's droop test (which he'll have to explain directly), but -- voila -- after a few moments on the table to congeal, the remaining pieces passed with flying colors, or rather a firm, high point. Maybe Pizza Hut, which had the chutzpah to take the edge off (maybe, without this sine qua non, they should call it "pizz") would be interested in patenting this congealing effect; Mike, a civil engineer, may be willing to do the necessary research.

Although not lazily convenient to campus, Penn Pizza is worth the short trip across the little river, in the direction of our proverbial pie-in-the-sky New York and New Haven north stars. Based on the eight-slice standard of excellence, we gave Penn Pizza six slices, which, paraphrasing Bambino Davis, is "pretty large."

Reviewed by:
Ron Yoshida, Dean of the College of Education
Perry Zirkel, Iacocca Professor of Education
Mike Davis, a Senior in Civil Engineering
Sharon Lohrmann, a Doctoral Student in Special Education

Penn Pizza, 554 North New Street, (610) 866-3532
Open Monday thru Thursday from 11:00 am to midnight; Friday and Saturday from 11:00 am to 1:00 am; and Sunday from 12 noon to midnight.

This review originally appeared in The Brown and White at Lehigh University.