Pizza Land
Pizza Land is the small brick storefront from the opening credits of The Sopranos. In addition to that, it’s also a damn good “old style” pizzeria. And “old style” is how they describe their thin-crust pan pizza.
These pan pizzas are baked in the deck of a very battered old oven, producing a thin, rigid crust with a deeply browned underside - sorta bar-pie-like in construction. There are certain modes of conflict resolution that go all the way back to the old country - the Mezzogiorno. One of them is trial by heat.
The pies here are very crisp. Mine was nearly black around the edges, to the point that I initially worried they had overbaked it. I have since learned that this has been their technique since time immemorial. And it was decidedly not burnt: the crust had a nice toasted flavor and a crisp, almost brittle texture. On top, it’s cheesy, greasy and heavily blistered, with mozzarella running almost all the way to the edge & nicely carmelized.
Sitting inside this largely unchanged North Jersey pizza shop - with the wood paneling, counter stools and ancient oven behind you - perhaps puts you back into a certain moral universe. It’s all very allegorical.
Sitting there, I found myself thinking about how little value self-knowledge has on its own. You can become remarkably good at understanding why you are the way you are: your appetites, resentments, evasions, and the elaborate structures you’ve built to avoid responsibility for any of it. But understanding yourself never necessarily becomes a sufficient reason to change. And gaining self-knowledge has no moral value unless it produces action, even if it helps you become a marginally better mafia boss. One thing you can never say is that you haven’t been told.
Of course, The Sopranos is great precisely because it never reduces itself cleanly to even that idea. But by the end, it’s not especially hard to see what it means to live a life poorly - there’s many ways it can go but none of them are good.
Pizza and the limits of self-knowledge. The sacred and the propane.
