In our hour of financial need pizzas are proving to be a comforting choice. Barnaby Barnes tries to find a masterpiece among the leading chains.

Transcription

1 Review Articles The London pizza taste test In our hour of financial need pizzas are proving to be a comforting choice. Barnaby Barnes tries to find a masterpiece among the leading chains. A pizza at the pizza chain Prezzo, central London. In her Classic Italian Cookbook, Marcella Hazan wrote: "There exist few things that are absolutely perfect, some of which nature has bestowed on man, and others that man has produced all by himself. There is no way to improve the form and function of the egg. Nor upon the taste of the genuine Neapolitan pizza." And in our hour of collective financial need, it seems that we are turning more and more to the chains of pizzerias that proliferate in our city centres. Domino's, the dominant main delivery brand, has reported a sales surge which it put down to the recession scaring people into staying in more. My tour of our most widely available pizza restaurants revealed that those people brave enough to spend money on eating out seem to be flocking to them in droves, possibly clutching the two-for-one coupons that have been printed in newspapers or on the back of cinema tickets lately. Some had queues around the block, and in Strada I was informed that they were down to their last two pizza bases, mid-way through dinner service. I went off in search of Hazan's culinary masterpiece, which, she said, should consist of "a crisp, clean" base with a "faintly sour, yeasty taste", specifying that "the tomatoes for the topping are simply tomatoes, not a sweetish sauces". These should, she says, be plum tomatoes so ripe they can be squeezed on to the base and go into the wood-fired oven raw. Oh, yes. I wondered how close the pizzas in our biggest chains would get to Hazan's criteria. Ask: 3 stars

2 It was like stepping back a decade or two, and none the worse for it - lots of whiteish tiles, palms in large colourful pots, and sturdy tables and chairs - which was just as well because at Sunday lunch, the cheery staff were having to cope with children of most ages. The pizza in question was a Four Seasons - prosciutto, pepperoni, artichokes, mushrooms, capers, black olives and fresh rosemary, all for There was fresh rosemary, added after baking - a nice touch. The base was OK, but no more. It was small but not quite cooked through. It needed about another seconds in the vast, nontraditional oven at the back. The toppings were decent and nicely handled. However, in common with most contemporary pizza - including a good many in Naples - there was too much mozzarella, which is indulgently gooey but tends to sit at the pit of your stomach. If only Ask had paid more attention to the quality of the tomato passata. It made me realise that the tomato component is the critical ingredient because it binds all the others together. Still, not bad. Pizza Express: 2 stars 8pm on a weekday and there was a queue out the door and down the street. Ah, the magic of the brand. And the product? As I edged forward into the warm fug, the first smell I noticed was that of burning oil, indicating that the pizza oven was wood fired, even if it was a large, modern bakers' oven rather than the traditional model, but could do with a clean. I opted for the Pizza Express special - a Capricciosa ( 8.15) with "prosciutto cotto, anchovies, fresh strips of red pepper, capers and olives, topped with a free-range boiled egg". Well, it was filling. But the base smelt and felt like a wet dog. The toppings were murky, muddled and mediocre, with the anchovies not exactly over-advertising their presence and the egg slightly sulphurous. Pizza Express makes some play about the quality of its mozzarella. That may be so, but I wish it would pay the same attention to the other ingredients and to the standard of the cooking. Pizza Hut: 0 stars It was crammed at lunchtime with parents and grandparents with children, and still more queuing up to get in. The efficiency with which these armies were dealt by staff armed with earpieces and walkie-talkies was impressive. Pizza Hut is all about systems. It's a processing plant. The menu has the title The Big-Hearted Menu. It could more accurately be called The Heart-Stopping Menu. Large pizzas haul in at 13.49; medium at 11.49; and individual at So not so cheap, as it happens. You can choose from the Speciality, Favourites, Classics and DIY categories. I give you all this information so that you never have to go there. I decided to have a Classic Super Supreme Medium with "spicy pork, pepperoni, ham slices, spicy beef, whole black olives and hand-picked mushrooms and mixed pepper". This is pizza gone gross, gone obese. The base has the weight and consistency of carpet underlay. And with the toppings, the whole thing becomes gooey, gunky, squidgy, fatty and filling. And, to confess the ghastly truth, oddly addictive. It appealed to all my baser instincts, which are considerable. Or did until I paid up and left, when I became aware of a disgusting greasy aftertaste

3 which lingered on and on, and took the best part of a packet of Trebor Extra Strong Mints to dispel. Prezzo: 0 stars Pizza Hut with pretensions. Trash food for businesspeople (to judge by the diners filling the tables and waiting patiently by the bar). A disgrace to the nobility of pizza. Evening Special: Pizza Agrodolce. Special it was. Especially disgusting - ill-conceived, badly made, with a specially floppy, spongy base hardly touched by heat. The topping was especially dolce - sweet - but of the promised agro - sour - there was no trace. It was a thick, heavy, tasteless mix of creamy cheese, tasteless tomatoes, characterless onions and God knows what else. It was impossible to see clearly in the darkness of the restaurant. Certainly taste was no guide. The evening was saved by: a) good espresso, which I poured over passable vanilla ice-cream; and b) a bottle of fine Morellino di Scansano. The service was a curious mixture of the rude, the charmless and the over-attentive. Avoid. Strada: 4 stars Strada makes you realise that the so-called pizza chains aren't pizza chains at all, but fast food chains. Here pizza actually takes up a relatively small part of the menu. There's an attempt at a classic Italian menu structure with primi, secondi, etc, although it spoils the impression by having pasta and risotto listed separately; visitors to Italy will know perfectly well that pastas and risottos are both primi. It was a Pizza Rossa for me - spicy southern Italian salami, roasted red peppers, chilli, onion, garlic, fresh oregano, tomato and mozzarella ( 8.95). This was the best of all the pizzas I tasted. The crust was thin and crisp and of a reasonable size. It was even cooked in a wood-fired oven. The flavours were well focused, although I'm not sure why you would use fresh oregano when southern Italians would use dried because it's much more potent; and I question the wisdom of including slices of garlic so pungent as to have seen off a squadron of vampires. Yet it was as close to Marcella Hazan's description as I came across, and good value too. Domino's: 1 star Apart from a bad smell of drains when I opened the box, this was far from the worst "pizza" I had to eat. In fact it was not unpleasant, a cunning contrivance of an airy breaded base (air being the cheapest ingredient a food manufacturer can lay his hands on), a creamy goo of utterly tasteless non-specific cheese, and highly flavoured bits of sausage and other meats. This is not a pizza. It is something to put into your mouth, and as such it's not too bad, although I suspect that if you lived on such concoctions, your hair and teeth could fall out and you'd die. They include a small tub of "garlic and herb" sauce inserted into the lid for you to dip your remaining crust into, presumably as a way of showing up the superiority of what you've just eaten. I have rarely put anything so comprehensively disgusting in my mouth.

4 As Not Seen On TV: Guy s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square Guy's American Kitchen & Bar Poor American $$$ 220 West 44th Street, Times Square Theatre District (646) By PETE WELLSNOV. 13, 2012 GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations? Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as Guy s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche, did your mind touch the void for a minute? Did you notice that the menu was an unreliable predictor of what actually came to the table? Were the bourbon butter crunch chips missing from your Almond Joy cocktail, too? Was your deep-fried boulder of ice cream the size of a standard scoop? What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy s, in any meaningful sense? Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn t come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air? Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson? When you have a second, Mr. Fieri, would you see what happened to the black bean and roasted squash soup we ordered? Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde? At your five Johnny Garlic s restaurants in California, if servers arrive with main courses and find that the appetizers haven t been cleared yet, do they try to find space for the new plates next to the dirty ones? Or does that just happen in Times Square, where people are used to crowding? If a customer shows up with a reservation at one of your two Tex Wasabi s outlets, and the rest of the party has already been seated, does the host say, Why don t you have a look around and see if you can find them? and point in the general direction of about 200 seats? What is going on at this new restaurant of yours, really? How, for example, did Rhode Island s supremely unhealthy and awesomely good fried calamari dressed with garlic butter and pickled hot peppers end up in your restaurant as a plate of pale, unsalted squid rings next to a dish of sweet mayonnaise with a distant rumor of spice? How did Louisiana s blackened, Cajun-spiced treatment turn into the ghostly nubs of unblackened, unspiced white meat in your Cajun Chicken Alfredo?

5 How did nachos, one of the hardest dishes in the American canon to mess up, turn out so deeply unlovable? Why augment tortilla chips with fried lasagna noodles that taste like nothing except oil? Why not bury those chips under a properly hot and filling layer of melted cheese and jalapeños instead of dribbling them with thin needles of pepperoni and cold gray clots of ground turkey? By the way, would you let our server know that when we asked for chai, he brought us a cup of hot water? When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN!, were you just messing with our heads? Does this make it sound as if everything at Guy s American Kitchen & Bar is inedible? I didn t say that, did I? Tell me, though, why does your kitchen sabotage even its more appealing main courses with ruinous sides and sauces? Why stifle a pretty good bison meatloaf in a sugary brown glaze with no undertow of acid or spice? Why send a serviceable herb-stuffed rotisserie chicken to the table in the company of your insipid Rice-a-Roni variant? Is this how you roll in Flavor Town? Somewhere within the yawning, three-level interior of Guy s American Kitchen & Bar, is there a long refrigerated tunnel that servers have to pass through to make sure that the French fries, already limp and oil-sogged, are also served cold? What accounts for the vast difference between the Donkey Sauce recipe you ve published and the Donkey Sauce in your restaurant? Why has the hearty, rustic appeal of roasted-garlic mayonnaise been replaced by something that tastes like Miracle Whip with minced raw garlic? And when we hear the words Donkey Sauce, which part of the donkey are we supposed to think about? Is the entire restaurant a very expensive piece of conceptual art? Is the shapeless, structureless baked alaska that droops and slumps and collapses while you eat it, or don t eat it, supposed to be a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane? Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish? Did you finish that blue drink? Oh, and we never got our Vegas fries; would you mind telling the kitchen that we don t need them? Thanks. Guy s American Kitchen & Bar POOR 220 West 44th Street (Seventh Avenue), (646) , guysamerican.com. ATMOSPHERE 500 seats, three levels, three bars, one chaotic mess. SERVICE The well-meaning staff seems to realize that this is not a real restaurant. SOUND LEVEL Rawk and roll, but at moderate volumes. PRICES Soups, salads and appetizers, $8.95 to $16.50; sandwiches, pastas and main courses, $16.95 to $ HOURS Sunday to Wednesday, 11:30 a.m. to midnight; Thursday to Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 1 a.m.

6 Two Book Reviews 1. Brutal Terrain By JAMES M. McPHERSON THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR A Military History By John Keegan Illustrated. 396 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35 John Keegan is our generation s foremost military historian. His 1976 book The Face of Battle helped start what is still called the new military history, with its emphasis on the cultural context of war and the actual experience of men in battle. In more than a dozen additional books, Keegan has demonstrated his narrative and analytical skills in the traditional genre of military history, concentrating on questions of command, strategy, tactics and the changing technologies of warfare. With great expectancy, therefore, one turns to his first book-length study of the Civil War. In some respects The American Civil War: A Military History fulfills such high expectations. With deft turns of phrase, Keegan portrays the weaknesses and strengths of the war s principal commanders. The Union general George B. McClellan suffered from a disabling defect as a commander: readiness to take counsel of his fears. He was psychologically deterred from pushing action to the point of result. Fearing failure, he did not try to win. In contrast, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, of whom little was expected at the beginning, turned out to be both an absolutely clearsighted strategist and a ruthless battle-winner. He displayed all the qualities that Lincoln hoped to find in McClellan but failed to. Grant had an extraordinary ability to visualize terrain in his mind s eye ; he quickly grasped how modern methods of communication, particularly the telegraph and the railroads, had endowed the commander with the power to collect information more quickly and the means to disseminate appropriate orders in response. Robert E. Lee s greatest gifts of generalship were quick and correct decision-making in the face of the enemy, exploitation of his enemy s mistakes and economic handling of the force available to him. But unlike Grant, Lee was not really a strategist, though he was a brilliant tactician and operational leader. As for other generals, Keegan considers Stonewall Jackson a military genius whose operational motto, however always mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy sometimes mystified his own subordinates. The Confederate general Braxton Bragg, though a fighter, was also bad-tempered and alienated most of his subordinates by insulting them, while William T. Sherman showed something of Grant s gifts of communication, quickness of decision and ruthless analysis of the military situation. In sum, Sherman and Grant were the two outstanding generals of the war because they recognized what Keegan calls the geostrategic problems facing Union armies and figured out how to overcome them. Geography, Keegan writes, is the most important of all factors that impinge on war-making, especially in North America, where the vast extent of territory and its varied and dramatic character oblige soldiers to conform to its demands more rigorously than in almost any other region of the world. The Confederacy comprised 800,000 square miles, an area about the size of Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Poland combined. The Southern coastline against which the Union navy mounted a blockade was 3,500 miles long. The Appalachian mountain chain constituted a military barrier to Union invasion, while many Southern rivers also provided strong defensive positions. These geostrategic obstacles eventually succumbed to the technology of steam power on rivers and rails, the mobility of armies commanded by Grant and Sherman, and the hard fighting that depleted Confederate manpower by battle, capture and attrition. The analytical value of Keegan s geostrategic framework is marred by numerous errors that will leave readers confused and misinformed. I note this with regret, for I have learned a great deal from Keegan s writings. But he is not at top form in this book. Rivers are one of the most important geostrategic features he discusses. The Ohio and its big tributaries, the Cumberland and the Tennessee, he writes, form a line of moats protecting the central Upper South, while the Mississippi, with which they connect, denies the Union any hope of penetration. The reality was exactly the contrary. These navigable rivers were highways for Union naval and army task forces that pierced the Confederate heartland, capturing Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis and other important cities along with large parts of Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and

7 Arkansas. Keegan acknowledges this reality later in the book when he notes that these rivers offered points of penetration to the Union into Confederate territory. Precisely. But Keegan s grasp of river geography and other terrain features is shaky. He confuses the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, seems to place the Confederate forts Henry and Donelson on the wrong rivers, has the Kanawha River join the Monongahela River at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River (it is the Allegheny River that joins the Monongahela, while the Kanawha empties into the Ohio 150 miles southwest of Pittsburgh) and shifts the state of Tennessee northward, where he says it gives on to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. The Confederates did not abandon their strong point on Island No. 10 on the Mississippi River; Union forces surrounded and captured it with its 5,000 defenders. Tunnel Hill at Chattanooga is not a feature of Lookout Mountain, and the battle of Cedar Mountain did not take place in the Blue Ridge. There are many other errors in the text, perhaps foreshadowed by wrong dates for a half-dozen battles on the map at the beginning of the book. North Carolina did not escape Union invasion until almost the end of the war (it was first invaded in February 1862); the old canard that some Union soldiers were bayoneted in their blankets at Shiloh is simply not true; at least 10 percent of United States soldiers in 1865 were black, not 3 percent; the British government recognized the Confederacy s belligerent status under international law in May 1861, not 1863; and so on. These and similar mistakes can perhaps be attributed to carelessness, but others seem inexplicable. Keegan declares that Lincoln never learnt the importance of visiting armies in the field, from which he might have discovered a great deal, apparently unaware that Lincoln visited armies in the field 11 times, spending 42 days in their camps. Describing the role of the United States Navy in the Civil War, Keegan makes the astonishing claim that at the outbreak of the conflict almost all of its antiquated warships were sailing vessels and that none had been launched later than In fact, 57 of the Navy s ships had been launched since 1822, and 23 of them were steamships, including six screw frigates launched in the 1850s that were as advanced as any ships of their class in the world. And what is one to make of the statement by Keegan, a native Englishman, that the British prime minister during the American Civil War was Benjamin Disraeli? (It was Viscount Henry Palmerston.) Keegan s sympathies lie with the Union cause in the war, and he considers Lincoln a better commander in chief than Jefferson Davis. Like Grant and Sherman, Lincoln abandoned altogether the conventional thought that the capture of the enemy s capital would bring victory. Instead he now correctly perceived that it was only the destruction of the South s main army that would defeat the Confederacy. But Keegan shares a widespread misconception about Lincoln s most eloquent expression of the war s meaning. The genius of the Gettysburg Address, he writes, lies less in his magnificent words than in his refusing to differentiate between the sacrifice of the North and the South. This assertion could not be more wrong. The soldiers who gave the last full measure of devotion at Gettysburg so that the nation might live were Union soldiers. No Confederates were buried in the cemetery that Lincoln dedicated; they fought to break up the nation that the brave men whom Lincoln honored fought to preserve. Far from refusing to differentiate between the sacrifice of the North and the South, Lincoln made the most profound differentiation. James M. McPherson s most recent book is Abraham Lincoln. 2. Book review The American Civil War Catherine Clinton enjoys a sophisticated contribution to the library of top books on the American Civil War Most scholars in the field of US 19th-century history spend a fiendish amount of time trying to come up with some clever title, while John Keegan s new study announces itself with deceptive simplicity: The American Civil War: A Military History. This sophisticated survey is far more than its subtitle suggests. Keegan places battle strategy at the core of his narrative but does not get mired in the sandbox of the mechanics of war. His balanced interpretation illuminates changes shaped by combat, but his analysis moves beyond battlefield outcomes. His 23 chapters include the usual suspects, but also feature home fronts, disease, sectionalism and other cultural topics. With fluid assurance Keegan distils the challenging literature that has made the Civil War one of the 19th century s most popular subjects (the equivalent of a book per day since Lee s surrender at Appomattox on 9 April 1865). The precision and punch of Keegan s narrative will please a broad audience.

8 Some may want to quibble over minor issues: yes, I would have preferred more on the Emancipation Proclamation and its impact as well as more than those two paltry pages on women even within his lean, mean 416 pages. But with elegant insights on everything from African American soldiers (impressive) to espionage (thin) to amphibious warfare (jolly good), and with several stanzas of Walt Whitman reproduced in his chapter on wounds, why complain? Keegan weaves together America s rebirth of freedom with the transformative powers of a war that turned home guards into warriors when citizen soldiers replaced professional combatants. Keegan s asides offer fresh insight: The armies of the Civil War were the worst tailored of any great conflict. He sardonically suggests that the popularity of facial hair gave American soldiers a preacherish appearance, perhaps appropriate considering both sides were fighting for an idea. Keegan conveys a genuine fondness for Ulysses S Grant even though his hair, beard, and wardrobe appeared undisturbed by grooming. Grant s talent for engineering and fondness for maps were traits that secured his advancement when terminal obscurity might have overtaken him. With economy and aplomb, the war unfolds across time and space: from the sap rollers digging in along the Mississippi who paved the way for Grant s greatest victory ( The fall of the Confederacy was settled when Vicksburg fell ) to an encounter between ironclads which changed naval warfare forever. Keegan powerfully depicts the ghastly encounter at Shiloh: whether soldiers wore blue or grey, American blood was being shed. Shiloh was one of the fiercest episodes of modern warfare until the Western Front in the First World War. Keegan s encyclopaedic knowledge pays rich dividends, as he invokes examples, from Waterloo to the Somme, from Sherlock Holmes to Churchill. His closing passages perhaps veer off course, when he suggests that European calls for a new social order under Lincoln were thwarted because American socialism was stillborn on the battlefields of Shiloh and Gettysburg. He suggests that the First World War produced a Siegfried Sassoon for Britain, but why didn t the Civil War? Like Edmund Wilson (who he discusses), Keegan fails to highlight that the Civil War s literary star was stillborn as well when the 16th president never got to write his memoirs, as Grant did. Lincoln s prose and oratory surely figure as prominently as poets of the First World War? Keegan reproduces the full text of the Gettysburg Address, as well as Lincoln s letter to Grant after Vicksburg, which closes: I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right and I was wrong, yours truly, Abraham Lincoln. Moral issues reverberate throughout, calling attention to the significance as well as the frailty of wartime personalities. This study winds down when the rebels surrender and Union victors buy souvenirs at Wilmer McLean s farmhouse, with Custer purchasing the desk Lee used for $20. But after Booth s bullet and the burial of America s first assassinated president, struggles of interpretation commence with reflections on one of the mysterious great wars of history. Its mystery has inspired terrific historians over the years, and Keegan s book will make a welcome addition to the list. Catherine Clinton teaches US history at Queens University Belfast. Recent books include Mrs Lincoln: A Life (Harper, 2009)