Jumbo Pizza: "Possibly decent things come in weird packages. Or something."

As you can tell I'm really struggling at titles here. This week I had the formidable pleasure of eating pizza with my close friend and former bandmate Johnny "Johnny Guitar" No-Pants, who is an excellent drummer. His rad band Stupid Party was recently on tour for six weeks, which means my days were dampened by the lack of his grinning visage shining it's ethereal light on my generally sour demeanor. So when the opportunity arose to wander around with him for a day and scarf some slices, it was kismet. And wander we did. I ended up walking 13 miles that day. I wore holes in the insoles of my busted ass boots!

I met Johnny in the early afternoon on 110th Street, and we headed to Giovanni's for a quick appetizer slice (report back: the pizza there still rules), because I had heard from my pal Dani that they'd pasted up MY grinning visage in their window, in the form of the Daily News article about Slice Harvester in which I publicly professed my love for their slice. It was there, and going in to get another slice with John Pants dispelled any fears I may have had that my vanity had gotten in the way of my anonymity, because the guy behind the counter, who had watched me getting photographed holding a slice of pizza in front of my face, didn't even recognize me.

While we were at Giovanni's, Johnny commented, "I love that we're eating a slice of pizza to get ready to spend the afternoon eating pizza!" And I think starting off with a good slice totally portended the general trend of decent slices that our day would soon hold.

Our first stop was Jumbo Pizza, which is a total enigma to me.


While the name and visage lead one to believe this is a pizza place that serves some other food, the interior seems like a decent greasy spoon where the pizza is an afterthought. I didn't have high expectations when I ordered my slice, but I was pleasantly surprised when I found out it cost $1.75. In fact, I asked the guy behind the counter to repeat himself.


This slice was a total preemie, but other than that, it was pretty good. Johnny said it reminded him of the pizza his Italian grandma used to make, although he was quick to add that "she was no chef." Luckily it doesn't take a chef to make a decent pizza, in fact chef's usually make ridiculous gourmet pizzas that have like, morels and gold shavings on them, so who cares what they think, right?

The sauce was a touch on the sweet side, and the cheese wasn't exceptional, though nor was it bad. The dough tasted great, but the texture left something lacking. I will definitely come back here, but I'll ask for my slice well done.

Jumbo Pizza
964 Amsterdam Ave
New York, NY 10025

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In the Other Pizza Blogs dept., I recently was alerted to the existence of Clinton Loves Pizza, presumably by Clinton himself, and I've gotta say, it's like the pizza blog equivalent of the time Aminah drank an entire bottle of cough syrup in like, 15 minutes on Joey Ramone day two years ago and then started puking this neon green slime in the middle of the sidewalk on 53rd and 3rd and totally freaked out all these yuppies. That is absolutely a compliment, if that wasn't clear.