Restaurants: A Tale of Two Pizzas

Adrienne’s Pizzabar
54 Stone Street (off Broad Street)

212-248-3838
http://www.adriennespizzabar.com/

Grimaldi’s Pizzeria
19 Old Fulton St. (under the Brooklyn Bridge)
718-858-4300

http://www.grimaldis.com/

Early last Friday evening, we ventured down to the Financial District and tried the super-thin crust pizzas at Adrienne’s Pizzabar—they were excellent! If you’re a fan of crusts that are more snappy wafer than chewy bread, you owe it to yourself to try an individual pie here, available with about a dozen different toppings. Reportedly, this place is packed and crazy during lunchtime and later at night, but during our experience in the early evening, we found it pleasantly quiet with attentive service.

It turned into a pizza weekend for us, because on Saturday, we found ourselves driving over the Brooklyn Bridge and in Dumbo. We decided to stop in at Grimaldi’s Pizzeria, where we hadn’t been for years. It was lunchtime and there was a long line waiting outside to get in. We obediently took our place, and about 35 minutes later, we were seated at a communal table. The classic pie came with a good and fresh tomato sauce, standard mozzarella cheese, and a crust slightly charred with a pleasant flavor from the coal-fired ovens. It was actually thicker and chewier than we remember. Perhaps we were cold from waiting outside for so long, but while good enough, we agreed that the Grimaldi pie wasn’t worth a special trip or a long wait outside.