Bravo’s pizza is worthy of a standing ovation

There is no food item in New York more iconic, more indulgent or more exquisite than a slice served hot from the oven at a really good pizzeria. I’ll never forget the first time my father brought me to New York at the ripe old age of nine. He took me to his old stomping grounds in Brooklyn and bought me a slice of pizza from some ancient establishment that he used to frequent during his days at the Mir. The slice I was given seemed massive and I remember it being the finest piece of pizza I had ever eaten.

There was a time when New York was dotted with similar kosher establishments whose primary fare was exceptional pizza. But something happened in the Nineties that gave rise to the surge in kosher fine dining and as a result New York lost its quality kosher pizza joints. Far from me to say that there isn’t good pizza available in the kosher world. There is in fact wonderful pizza, it’s just that some things have changed in ways that has left the New York kosher community bereft of the brilliantly constructed pies it once had access to. Slices became smaller, toppings applied less liberally and slowly but surely the pizza places began to each provide products so markedly similar that every restaurant’s pizza tasted like every other restaurant’s pizza. The travesty is that we accepted this sad state of affairs. We thought nothing of the fact that where once there was considerable pride taken in the superiority and consistency of the pizza we ate, now we measured the difference in quality by centimeters rather than feet. To quote a non-kosher friend, “kosher pizza just tastes like…kosher pizza.” In other words, we have altered our standards to adjust for the fact that the vast majority of kosher pizza restaurants at their very best make good pizza, maybe even great pizza, but it’s still a far cry from the excellence it used to be. That is why when a friend told me about how a formerly treif pizzeria called Bravo Pizza had gone kosher I excitedly hauled into the city to see if they would produce a slice like the one I remembered.