I grew up in Connecticut, but now going on thirty years of living in Oregon, I am sometimes baffled by my birth state’s public persona as a place where New Yorkers go to become boring. Yes, parts of the third smallest state are exactly that, and the only thing this list of bands from Connecticut is good for is what not to name your band. But once you’re at least 90 minutes from New York City, the woods grow thicker, the accents grow coarser, and the food gets better and better. Connecticut: birthplace of the hamburger. Connecticut: home of the lobster roll, the real one, served warm with melted butter instead of cold with mayonnaise. Connecticut: home of the chicken cutlet grinder, a cold-style sub with a hot chicken cutlet slotted in the middle. Connecticut: home of the white clam pizza.
Last year, Hannah Goldfield’s piece about New Haven Pizza in the New Yorker got me thinking about the other Connecticut pizza, which is sometimes called Greek Style, or New England Style. While the more famous apizza style that hails from New Haven is strictly Italian, and Neapolitan to boot, Greek pizza is a bastard. Legend has it that this style of pizza was born in New London, a fifteen minute drive from my hometown of Norwich. The inventor was a Greek immigrant named Costas Kombouzis, whose dough prep shortcut resulted in a new species of pizza that would proliferate over New England for the next 6 decades.
Instead of stretching dough to order as in the Neapolitan style, Kombouzis stretched his right into oiled shallow pans, and let it proof overnight, saving him a step later on. Today, Greek-style, sometimes known as New England-style pizza, is characterized by this differentiation: a crust that chews somewhere between focaccia and thin-crust. There’s a noticeable amount of oil, which results in a crisp but unctuous crust if cooked right, and leaden and greasy if wrong. Greek style gets a heavy hand of oregano-forward long-cooked tomato sauce, and an even heavier hand of a mixture of aged mozzarella and cheddar cheeses. The legendary Mystic Pizza? Greek style.1
The most popular comment about the New England-slash-Greek-style on a pizza subreddit sums it up: “When it’s good, it’s good. When it’s bad, it’s bad.” It would be hard to gather the data, and I’m not in a position to launch my own investigation, but I have a suspicion that Greek-style pizzas today are bad more than good, and only getting worse, since the obsession with other styles of pizza (Neapolitan, Detroit, Grandma, etc…) are currently dominating the zeitgeist.
Unlike Neapolitan style, there seems to be no rules, or morality, when it comes to toppings at a Greek-style pizza place. You’ve got your anchovy, bacon, broccoli, eggplant, green peppers, roasted peppers, ham, hamburger, jalapeño, meatball, mushroom, olive, onion, pepperoni, sausage, and spinach. There’s taco pizza, Philly cheesesteak pizza, and sundry takes on chicken pizza. Personally, I find even one iteration of chicken pizza deeply offensive (In my America, banning chicken on pizza would be the 28th amendment), but in suburban New England, anything goes.
By the 1980’s, 40% of pizzerias in Connecticut were Greek owned, but I think that was closer to 100% in the 5 mile vicinity that was my childhood’s pizza universe. All of these places had and still have extensive menus: pizza menu, grinder menu, pasta menu, and a house specials menu that included moussaka and pasticcio, and chicken, veal, or eggplant parmigiana.
Dino’s, Rina’s, Great Oak, Olympic, and Tambora’s all ranked high, but “our place” was Pizza Kitchen, for no other reason than it was closest to our house. In fact, I could walk there, which I sometimes did on a saturday. Was it good pizza? No. In fact, it was probably the worst of the best places in town. Always too saucy, and could have used a few more minutes in the oven is how those pies will always be remembered. But if mom said we could have pizza for dinner, it was coming from Pizza Kitchen, and that would be that.
And once we were old enough to answer the phone in my family, we were old enough to call up Pizza Kitchen and order it ourselves. In fact, we were made to. In an otherwise safe and comfortable childhood, calling up Pizza Kitchen was a slice of torture barely endured, and it never got easier. One of my brother’s favorite tricks was to dial the number and act as if he was taking charge and ordering the pizza, then shove the receiver in my ear once the call was picked up. There was something so aggressive and threatening about how those two words, “Pizza” and “Kitchen” were brought together by the guy, always the same guy, who answered the phone like he might jump through it and ring your neck.
“PIZZA KITCHEN”
“Uh, can I order some pizza”
“GAHEAD”
“Um, a cheese and a meatball”
“YAH WAN TOES SMAULAHLAAGE”
“Um, what?”
“SMAULAHLAAGE”
“Um”
“SMAHL. OW. LAHGE”
“Oh, small”
“NAME”
“Rosenberg”
“TWENNY MINNITS. G’BYE”
My friend Ashley lived up the street and hers was also a Pizza Kitchen family. To this day she and I still laugh about how traumatic those Pizza Kitchen phone calls were.
After weeks of thinking and reading about Greek Pizza, I decided to make my own, with the help of J.Kenji Lopez’s meticulously developed recipe for Serious Eats. The result looked like what a Pizza Hut personal pan pizza looked like to a stoned college student version of me, which is to say puffy, molten, and greasy all in the best ways. The crust was suitably crispy on the outside, and light but structured on the inside, like a good focaccia. The sauce was rich and ample beneath a weighted blanket of cheese. Of all the pizzas I’ve made at home, this may have been one of the most successful.
The kicker to all of this is…I didn’t have a single bite. I’ve was (and am) on a ketogenic diet at the time of this writing, but so invested I’ve been in re-creating the pizza of my youth that I made it for my friend Robbie, a skateboarder and truck driver and dead ringer for Jeff Spicolli from Fast Times At Ridgemont High. I made a “keto” version for myself with a crust recipe I am too embarrassed to share, but know that it the main ingredient is chicken breast. Humiliating.
Robbie gave it a 9 out of 10. Robbie also loves Hawaiian food, which is among my least favorite cuisines in the world, so I’m not sure if there is a handicap on that score in either direction. The important thing was that it looked good, smelled good, and no one had to talk to the Pizza Kitchen Guy.
My high school ‘boyfriend’ Hunter was a weekend dishwasher at Mystic Pizza in the mid ‘80’s. He was obsessed with working there and the family who ran it. One day he called me and said, “‘Bin. You’re not going to believe this, but they’re making a movie about Mystic Pizza!” This was the most absurd thing I had ever heard, and clearly a lie. Of all the lies that Hunter told, however, this was not one of them.