Every week, I document another dish that impressed and satiated me during my food adventures around New York City
I’m pretty much at that point now where my well of backlogged meals from pre-COVID has pretty much dried up.
There are definitely some more interesting dishes to write about but the obvious ones in my mind have been put out there for you. So what to do now?
Well the answer came to me while stocking up on groceries for this lockdown. Frozen food from New York food businesses!!
Now again, I’m not sure how extensive that will go but I did purchase a frozen pizza from the famous Roberta’s in Bushwick and I was pleasantly surprised. So much so that I knew it had to be a Dish of the Week.
Looking back on my review of Roberta’s, I also realized how out-of-date that is. I wrote about their pizza over ten years ago in 2009 shortly after they opened. Certainly before they became the epicenter of the Brooklyn food world.
Since then I’ve had Roberta’s wood-fired pies many times, mostly at one of the Manhattan food halls, but never really made much more comment about it on the blog.
I do want to say that I think their Neapolitan pies are usually very good (and probably deserve higher than my discerning 7 out of 10 back in 2009). But could a frozen version really hold up?
I have to say it comes pretty close. The most impressive part is the puffy cornice that captures that brown char in the freezing process somehow. My conventional gas oven managed to puff it up a bit and give it a nice chew. It’s no “hot out of the wood oven” experience but it’s closer than I thought I could have during quarantine.
The mozzarella blobs maybe were a bit gooey and less satisfying than at the establishments. But this is by far the best and most exciting frozen pizza I ever had.
If New York food establishments are creating frozen food this good, I’m not sure I need to go back out to eat again anytime soon.
| ROBERTA’S |
| robertaspizza.com |
