Saturday, April 28, 2012

New Haven Pizza Wars - Modern

My fourth and final battle of the New Haven Pizza Wars took place the other day at Modern Apizza, which I choose for a few reasons: it has some pretty stellar Yelp reviews, a handful of people I've met in New Haven mentioned it in their list of apizzarias to hit up ("oh, you gotta go to Sally's, definitely Moderne, Pepe's too..."), and it's not nestled within the much-hyped Wooster Square area that's home to my now-familiar apizza haunts. It was time to branch out from the usual.



By this point I knew the drill - arrive early on a weekday, marvel at the amount of people who already have giant pizzas on their tables, grab the first booth I can find, order myself a small mozzarella-and-mushroom-pie.

I first noticed how extremely nice and speedy the waitstaff was. While the folks at the other three restaurants weren't not nice, they were pretty blasé about the whole serving thing, and I definitely waited quite a while for things like water, food, and my check. At Modern, I was greeted immediately upon sitting down, given water mere seconds after that, and though the restaurant was almost completely full by the time I place my order (New Havenites really like their apizza), my lunch arrived just 9 minutes later.



It wasn't the most photogenic of apizzas. And at first sight, I wasn't too impressed - the cheese was an odd, pale color, I was uninspired by the mushrooms, and as I had since come to expect, burnt sections dotted the edges.


It was, however, pretty tasty. Ample amounts of cheese covered the crust - so much more than I'm now used to that I realized just how much cheese actually goes on a pizza (versus an apizza). Under my old Chicago-style circumstances, I would never had thought this was a lot of cheese.  The sauce was sweet, the crust had a nice crunch to it, and I was delighted to discover what I thought were completely burnt parts were instead just tastefully blackened. The mushrooms, though, were definitely out of a can.



With tax and tip, it cost $12.50, and I was happy to eat the leftovers for lunch breakfast the next day.

Stay tuned for next week, when I wrap up the war correspondence and determine, once and for all, who makes the best apizza in New Haven.


Want to read the previous Pizza War entries? Here's where I talk about Abate'sPepe's, and Sally's

1 comment:

  1. There were only two parties in front of us so we knew we would make the first seating.
    restaurants in newhaven

    ReplyDelete