Pizza
by Diana Cercone
No matter how you slice it, pizza has to be America’s favorite food. Forget about apple pie. On average, every man, woman and child in America eats 46 slices, or 23 pounds, of pizza per year. In their lifetime, each will devour at least 6,000 slices. Compare that to eating pie, the same folk in a year will eat only six slices, albeit apple, peach, pecan, chocolate cream, key lime, or you name it—just not pizza pie. That’s a measly 500 slices for each in their lifetime.
Of course, depending on the style and quality of pizza, some of us will eat more than 46 slices in a year. It’s a good bet that Dan Whitaker of Mike’s York Street Bar & Grill will be one. Dan’s been a longtime fan of pizza. But on a recent sit-down with him at his Warminster bar and restaurant, he confessed that he was never convinced that the pizza he was eating was the real deal. There always seemed to be something missing, he says.
And this bothered him. After all, Dan knows good food. With his partners, Michael (Mike) Dougherty, Rose DiMarco Carbonara and Skip DiMarco, he owns the Lambertville Station, and with Mike and Rose has owned Mike’s York Street Bar & Grill for 25 years. But it wasn’t until Dan discovered Nomad Pizza in Hopewell, NJ—thanks to a father, a NJ State Police officer, from his sons’ football team—that he tasted a pizza that came close to his idea of perfection. (Nomad specializes in Neapolitan pizza baked in wood-fired ovens.)
“I fell in love with it,” he says. From his first bite, he knew he wanted to offer Neapolitan pizza to his customers at Mike’s York Street Bar & Grill. That was about five years ago.
During that time, whenever the three partners heard there was a good Neapolitan pizza being made, they would go and taste it. From Asbury Park to Jersey City to Philadelphia, and from the Main Line to Liberty Pizza in Lambertville—even to New York City—they tasted and took notes. In addition Mike researched the different wood-burning ovens and special equipment needed to make authentic Neapolitan pizza.
To continue reading Can You Top This, turn to page 112 of Spring2016 issue of Bucks County Magazine.