PIZZA REVIEW: New Park Pizza

My search for the best pizza in New York continues….

I had practically surrendered to the fact that I would probably never get to try New Park Pizza. My days of traveling to the ends of the five boroughs to sample pizza have dwindled since the early days of this blog.

But I knew New Park Pizza is a cult classic and many (mostly people from Queens) call it the best in the city. It was definitely important for me to make the pilgrimage.

The way I finally made it there was sort of by accident. I had an early morning flight out of JFK so decided to stay close by the night before. Of course that means I had to find some local iconic food for dinner. We chose an old Italian seafood joint called Lenny’s Clam Bar. What ended up being practically next door? You guessed it.

So after a giant plate of fried seafood topped with spice tomato sauce, New Park Pizza was calling my name for dessert.

When I walked into the divey take-out side of New Park, I saw that they were closing up the sit down area. It felt like the end of the evening, but the hours posted were until 1am and there was still a steady stream of customers.

I had read that the way to order the pizza here is “well done” and since I love crisp crust and browned cheese, I took that advice. Bad idea.

This is not going to be a popular opinion but I thought the pizza here (at least the one slice I tried) had a lot of problems.

For me, the biggest issue was that “well done” truly translated to burnt. This was not a char or a browned crust. It was full on black and tasted like a mouthful of carbon. Pretty gross. As we drove away, I tried finding something to get the taste out of my mouth.

On the other side, the pizza was a bit soggy. That surprised me since I would have thought “well done” would have meant crisp. That was not the case.

Despite these major downfalls, the ingredients were pretty good. The cheese had a lot of salty and tangy flavors while the tomato sauce was a nice balance between sweet and acidic. The few bites that were not bordered by charcoal held potential.

I do realize that a different visit here with a different verbal order might have resulted in a more positive experience. So considering the hype, I probably should return and order a slice without any additional directions. It might be good. Hopefully I’ll find another reason to find out.

Is New Park Pizza Suprema the best pizza in NY? Many say it is but based on this one experience, I would have to rate it very low on the scale giving it a 5 out of10 due to a soggy front and an unpleasant burnt backside.