Tag: staten island

Joe & Pat’s Pizzeria

January 2, 2016

Staten Island, NY

Happy New Year!

We started out 2017 with a pizza place not on either Daily Meal list, but one that has been on our personal NYC pizza bucket list for a little while now, Joe & Pat’s. You may remember my previous post from Rubirosa where I mentioned a particular “family recipe originating in Staten Island”. Well, to be more specific, that recipe originated at Joe & Pat’s.

Monday was a recovery day from New Year’s, and we both had off from work. It was raining and pretty nasty outside, but we didn’t want to spend the whole day indoors.

Eric had the idea to head back to Staten Island and get some pizza. I actually never thought that we would have another excuse to drive back to Staten Island, but we did have Joe & Pat’s on our list. It is too bad there isn’t more to do on Staten Island because it is a nice, easy drive from our house. Much easier than driving into the city or into Brooklyn.

We got to the pizzeria and decided to just order a bunch of slices. The slices are thin crust, not like your traditional NY slice, but they were extremely similar to Rubirosa. We almost tried a vodka slice to compare to Rubirosa’s vodka slice, but we ended up going with one plain slice, two white ricotta slices, and one sicilian (for Eric).

Overall, the slices were good, but the cheese slice was a little floppy and greasy. The white slices could have been a little warmer, but we give the sauce and cheese decent marks. I bet if we had ordered a whole pie instead it would have held up a bit better.

We left still a little hungry. Our days of getting full on two thin slices are long gone. We considered getting a couple more slices, but we ended up going for ice cream instead. We stopped at Egger’s Ice Cream parlor, which made some good homemade ice cream, and was just over a mile away.

 

We ended our Staten Island outing with a movie. We’ve had a few Regal movie gift cards sitting around for a couple of years now, and there don’t seem to be any Regal theaters around us in NJ. So we were excited to see a theater in Staten Island that took them! It ended up being a great, rainy start to the New Year, although I’m not sure we’ll be back to Staten Island again any time soon

      

We’re looking forward to many more pizza adventures in 2017!! And be sure to keep reading to hear about the rest of our 2016 trips!

To visit:

Joe & Pat’s Pizzeria and Restaurant
1758 Victory Boulevard
Staten Island, NY 10314

BarbaraLeave a comment

#35 Denino’s

December 27th, 2015

Staten Island, NY

The 2015 list had two pizza places located out on Staten Island. We hit the first one early on in our journey, since it is much quicker to drive into Staten Island from NJ than driving out to Brooklyn or Queens. Denino’s is the second pizzeria on the list, and it is ranked slightly higher, at #35.

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Denino’s originally opened as a tavern on Staten Island in the late 1930’s, and started making pizzas in 1951. We heard the sausage here was worth trying, so we split a pie with half sausage, half plain.  The sauce is a bit sweeter than some of the other NYC pies, and the crust is a bit softer than your typical brick oven.

After trying out these two Staten Island pizzerias, we are definitely able to discriminate a Staten Island pie from a NY slice. We can understand why people like this pizza if they grow up with it, but something about it seemed to be lacking compared to your typical NY-style pie.

We thought maybe it was the crust, which is a different texture and slightly crispier, or the sauce, which was a tad too sweet for us, or possibly the cheese, which wasn’t actually very flavorful. We did think it had the edge over Lee’s Tavern, though. Neither one of us ranked it very high on our personal lists, but so far it is the best Staten Island pizza we’ve had.

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Anyone else know any other places on Staten Island that we should hit? We’d be interested in comparing a few more.

To visit:

Denino’s
524 Port Richmond Ave
Staten Island, NY 10302

 

 

 

 

 

BarbaraLeave a comment

#56 Lee’s Tavern

December 13th, 2015

Staten Island, NY

We’ve been in NJ for a couple of years now, and we’ve been all around New York City, except for Staten Island. We were talking on our drive out to Lee’s Tavern about this, and we both were wondering what we could do on Staten Island aside from eat pizza. (We couldn’t come up with anything, but we’d be interested to know if you have any fun things to do on Staten Island the next time we go there for pizza.)

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Lee’s Tavern is one of two pizza places on Staten Island that made the 2015 list. It’s primarily known as a family and community bar, although the pizza always gets mentioned in “Best of NYC” lists. I don’t think I’d call it one of the best in NYC, although Eric has ranked this higher on his list.

The consensus is to order the clam or the pepperoni here so we ended up trying the white clam and then also a veggie to round it out. The crust is pretty thin, kind of similar to Rubirosa. The toppings were OK. The veggies weren’t cut very small, so it was a little difficult to eat. As for the clam, well, if you’ve tried a New Haven clam pie, you won’t be very impressed. We were happy to try something different, though.

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Another thing that didn’t sell us here was the service. If you are a regular here or part of the town, you may be actually greeted and seated when you walk in. We walked in, waited a bit for them to even notice that we were looking for a table, and then waited way too long to get our pizza. It wasn’t even that it was crowded (you can see behind me in the photo that there are empty tables!) The family next to us offered to sell us one of their slices, for $10. We must have looked extra hungry.

To visit:

Lee’s Tavern
60 Hancock Street
Staten Island, NY 10305

BarbaraLeave a comment