DeLucia's Brick Oven Pizza

Talk about enormous expectations and humongous high hopes…9.4 is a lofty rating reserved for pizza LEGENDS. Thanks to the “Barstool Bump,” people are standing in lines outside this joint for over 2 hours. I called in my order of one large pizza at 4:30pm and was told it would be ready for pickup at 9:30pm! Business is booming so well, they had to set pie limits of 4 per customer. It’s not like this is a brand new pizzeria, this biz actually dates back to 1917 when they were baking bread here and they’ve been cranking out brick oven pizzas since the 1930s, exclusively a pizzeria since 1950. My first impression upon opening the box, half of the pie is charred cheese bubbles glazed in grease, the other half is soupy, sloshing cheese, soaked in grease and oozing with oil. The pie did come right out of the oven like fresh hot molten lava, so I realized it would take some time to congeal, but the oil was abnormally abundant. That being said, the texture of the dough was phenomenal. Crispy, firm undercarriage, thickish football style, very tasty with medium char. This provides an excellent base for the rest of the ingredients as well as a terrifically crunchy crust. Sadly, the cheese is drowning in oil, too greasy to really decipher the taste other than saltiness. But the biggest letdown of all the ingredients is the sauce: not sweet, not bitter, boringly bland, no kick, punch or pizzazz, essentially flavorless. Maybe it’s overwhelmed by the oil intake but the taste is indistinguishable. I had to dump garlic powder on the other slices to compensate. I can’t even begin to describe the level of disappointment. I respect Portnoy’s palate and the fact that we have different tastes when it comes to great pizza, but to hang a 9.4 on this joint and put it up in the hallowed heavens with DiFara, John’s of Bleecker, Lucali and the New Haven spots is like saying Harold Baines in the same type of Hall of Famer as Babe Ruth, Ted Williams & Willie Mays. Dave’s rating is essentially a “Backdoor Barstool Fund” bolstering business for this place, and I’m very happy for them; they’re good people making good pizza, not legendary. You could argue it’s travel-worthy scoring in the low 8s, but I wouldn’t. However, I do recommend you try it for yourself and see where it stacks up among the best pizza you’ve ever had. I contend it’s overrated and overhyped, but give it a try, unbiased and uninfluenced and I think you’ll see it’s good, not Hall of Fame worthy.