57 Napoli’s $6 Pizza Special is Kind of a Let Down
Every time a new pizza place opens in Midtown I get hopeful that we will be one step closer to ending the Midtown pizza debate once and for all. 57 Napoli Pizza E Vino seemed promising enough but a bit too expensive, until they introduced the $6 10-inch personal pizza made with fresh mozzarella. It seemed too good to be true.
Could this be the Midtown Lunch fancy pizza savior we’ve been waiting for?
One thing before the pizza: you guys should be super excited when I wake up at half past dawn to go running. Simply put, it gives me the metabolism of a fat guy. Even with a big breakfast, my stomach is still a bottomless pit at lunchtime (i.e. it takes a LOT of food to make me happy for the afternoon.) On the morning I went to 57 Napoli, I did manage to roll out of bed and get on the treadmill. In other words, I was really ready to put 57 Napoli’s $6 pizza to the test.
As I waited for my lunch, I noticed what others were eating-thin crust, crunchy, appetizing pizzas. Nice toppings, good upskirts, between that and the photo on I Dream of Pizza, it looked like my pizzetta would be the perfect lunch. The 10″ pizza looked to be the equivalent of one and a half to two slices, and is cooked in a wood-fired brick oven (I’m totally willing to do $3 a slice for brick oven pizza.)
Then mine came.
It looked small, with regular shredded mozzarella cheese. No fresh mozzarella here. No little clippings of basil leaves. I was surprised, but not deterred. After all taste is the most important thing, and $6 is still a good deal. Sadly the sauce is way sweeter than I personally like, the crust fairly flimsy, soggy, and bland. Pick up one piece and you can easily have a cheese sliding off broken crust mess. Between the sweet sauce and the crust, it reminded me of Elio’s (aka cafeteria pizza) and there wasn’t nearly enough of it to even partially satiate my hunger.
Maybe I got the wrong pizza? Or did I make a mistake by not tipping off the restaurant to the fact that their food would be on the interwebs! (We’re not “reviewers” here on Midtown Lunch, who take photos first and ask questions later. We’re just regular lunchers, who happen to pull out out a camera after the food already comes out.)
So, in the end the $6 pizza was a total disappointment. I know fresh mozzarella is expensive. And for $6 what do you expect? Plus they just opened. Maybe it will get better? In other words I’m not completely giving up on this place, but I would have probably been better off trying their under $10 chicken parm instead- and may still stop by for that. But next time I want an under-$10 personal pizza, I’ll just spend two more dollars and get an entire pie at 99¢ pizza.
57 Napoli Pizza E Vino (on the second floor of C’est Bon Cafe), 120 East 57th St. (between Park & Lex), 212-750-4586
Posted by Blondie at 11:50 am, March 26th, 2010 under 57 Napoli Pizza e Vino.
19 Comments | RSS comments feed for this post
Wow, disappointing $6 personal pie? :(
I guess I will have to stick with 2 Bros. then.