April

Fratelli Pizza and Wine Bar – Upper East Side

I’m writing pizzeria reviews as Examiner.com’s Manhattan Pizza Examiner. I know it shows that I have the palate of a 5-year-old, but pizza’s easily my favourite food, so you can count on me for plenty of fangirling over crust and sauce in these articles.

The most important thing I learned thanks to an invitation to dine on the house at Fratelli Pizza and Wine Bar on the Upper East Side is that “fratelli” means “brother” in Italian. So the famed Fratelli brothers in “The Goonies” were really the Brother brothers. You’re welcome. Brothers Jon and Marc Bash opened Fratelli in 2007 after successfully running a cafe next door, and the family theme continues in more than just the name of the place.

Either everyone who comes to this pizzeria on 1st Avenue near 71st Street is actually related, or the neighborhood just spends so much time here that the brothers have gotten to know all of them. I got a warm welcome and a prime table by the windows up front and thought I was pretty special until I saw that everyone who came in after me got a hand shake, a hug, a kiss on the cheek, and the kind of familiar chatter you don’t get in less tightly-knit areas of the city. There were babies sleeping in strollers, girlfriends having wine after work, and a long tableful of teenage girls taking selfies and celebrating a birthday. At 6:30 p.m., when other restaurants in the city are just opening, Fratelli was practically buzzing. Read the rest here!

Emily – Pizza in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn

The basic feeling in Brooklyn is that there’s already a pizza saturation, that we’re going to keep trying to reinvent the wheel to the point that it becomes square again, that the last thing we need is another adorable little hipster pizza joint with funny toppings. . . but no one’s saying that about Emily in Clinton Hill. Made famous by its crowd-sourced pizza oven funded via a Kickstarter campaign led by Emily herself for longtime pizza chef/owner/husband Matt Hyland, Emily is an adorable little hipster pizza joint on a quiet street next to an equally adorable bar (Hanson Dry) that’s really enjoying the nightly crowd of people needing someplace to spend the half-hour wait to get in for a pie. It’s candlelit and packed tight with tables for two, and the service is the sort that lets you know the staff has a real interest in this place succeeding, partly because Emily is providing a lot of it. Read the rest here!