fly the pizza express
Ken Hoffman calls on pizza fans to take new flight from Hobby to New Haven
Houston pizza lovers should be planning trips to New Haven this summer.
How much do you love pizza? How far would be willing to travel, and how much would you pay for the absolute greatest, the Holy Grail of pizza?
If you watch Dave Portnoy’s pizza reviews online – one bite, everybody knows the rules – you know that New Haven, Connecticut is home to the most incredible pizza anywhere and nowhere else is close.
That’s where you find the Big Three of pizza: Sally’s Apizza and Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana on Wooster Street, and Modern Apizza around the corner on State Street.
Fly the Pizza Express
But for Houstonians to travel to New Haven is tricky, expensive and time-consuming. There are no direct flights from Houston to New Haven. You’d have to fly to New York City (currently $261 roundtrip on United), catch a shuttle to Penn Station in Manhattan ($20) and then hop a train to New Haven (two hours and about $120 roundtrip back to New York).
But starting June 14, a new air service is coming to Houston. Avelo Air will fly non-stop between Hobby Airport and Tweed Airport in New Haven. Tickets will cost $98 each way. Seats will cost between $64 for front row bulkhead and $26 for the middle seat in the back row. All in, expect to pay about $250 roundtrip Houston-New Haven. You can practically smell that pepperoni pie coming out of the oven at Frank Pepe’s already.
Avelo Air is a small airline. While it services 43 destinations in the U.S., its entire fleet of airplanes consists of 16 Boeing 737s.
Service between Houston and New Haven will take place only on Mondays and Fridays. The flight takes 3 hours and 50 minutes in both directions. So you can make a weekend visit in New Haven – departing Houston on Friday and returning the following Monday. You can crush a ton of pizza over those three days.
Pizza Capital of America
Is it worth the time and money to take the Pizza Express to New Haven? Put it this way, I’ve been to New Haven. I’ve eaten the pizza there. It’d be worth the trip if, like the golden oldie song Kansas City, you might take the train, you might take a plane, but if you have to walk, you should be goin’ just the same.
Yeah, New Haven pizza is that knee-shaking.
A few years ago, my friend Mark George and his son Matthew, my son Andrew and I were in New York for the July 4 Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island. I convinced them, while we’re up here, let’s take the train to New Haven and try that pizza everybody talks about. We’ll eat some pizza and come right back to Manhattan.
We walked from the train station and found Sally’s Apizza, 237 Wooster Street. We first thought, let’s order one large pizza and we’ll split it. Common sense and self-awareness stepped in and we decided to order two large pizzas and we’ll take the leftover slices back to Manhattan.
The waiter brought us our pizzas. They were very large and shaped more like an off-kilter oval than a circle. The pizza was cut into squares. One look and we definitely should have just ordered one pizza.
Ten minutes later, both pizzas were reduced to a few crumbs left on our plates. The pizza was perfect, charred black around the edges, and (as Dave Portnoy would say) good undercarriage and no flop.
It was the best pizza, maybe the best thing, I’ve ever eaten. I pondered, how can I ditch these three losers and spend a couple of days in New Haven?
Now a word of warning: you can order Sally’s Apizza online at Goldbelly.com. They will be delivered frozen to your door in two days for $100. The pizzas are 12 inches – small. They offer five varieties: sauce and mozzarella (plain cheese), pepperoni, white potato and rosemary, plain tomato and garden special (veggie).
But just as the Nathan’s hot dogs you get in a Houston supermarket bear no resemblance to the regal natural casing dogs they serve at Nathan’s stand in Coney Island, the Sally’s Apizza that arrives frozen rock hard on your doorstep is nothing like the amazing pizza they serve bubbling hot from a coal-fired oven in New Haven.
Nothing against Goldbelly, but the next time anybody makes a tolerable frozen pizza will be the first time.
