Restaurant Review: The New York Slice that Slices Through Tradition, at Mama’s Too

For most of its time on earth, the New York slice has not been seen as a product that needed tinkering. Yes, pizza in the city has been accessorized with toppings from crayfish (not bad) to Buffalo chicken (hmm) to Caesar salad (no, no, no, no, no). But the foldable, portable triangles of cheese, sauce and dough themselves were generally held to be a natural resource that was perfect as is, much like the soft, unfiltered city tap water claimed to be the source of their excellence. Some pizzerias try to make a better slice. Very few try to make a different slice.

Mama’s Too makes a different slice. It combines some of the most appealing elements of a Neapolitan pie with the most satisfying aspects of the archetypal product sold on paper plates from sidewalk windows. It is as if Frank Tuttolomondo, the owner and pie architect of this informal but very serious pizzeria on the Upper West Side, has learned how to genetically modify pizza.

The bulge of crust at the edge of what Mama’s Too calls the “house slice” is brown, more rough than smooth and baked to a ferocious crackle. You could tear it off and enjoy it on its own, or maybe with butter or olive oil, just as you can with the best Neapolitans. Yet the flat layer of crust on the bottom is firm, without the soupy center of the Neapolitan style. True to New York form, you can hold it in the air by the curved rim and it will stay flat and parallel to the floor.

As they do at Totonno’s and some other brick-oven pizzerias, Mr. Tuttolomondo lays the cheese down before the sauce. Rather than drippy, milky discs of fresh mozzarella, though, he covers the raw dough (after priming it with olive oil) in shreds of a slice-friendly variety that is known in the trade as low-moisture mozzarella and that the rest of us call pizza cheese. Over this, he ladles a few blots of tomato pulp. This helps the crust to bake through without getting soggy, keeps the cheese from sliding off the crust, and most of all lets you taste the tomatoes, which are very good. You could, I suppose, think of the house slice as a white pizza with tomato-sauce topping.

After the pie comes out of the oven, Mr. Tuttolomondo sprinkles it with grated two-year-old Parmigiano-Reggiano. Basil leaves are the last to go on.

At this point, you can pay, walk out the door and amble toward Broadway and 106th Street cradling your slice in a paper plate and taking bites as you go. In other words, you can have the traditional sidewalk pizza experience, but you will be tasting flavors you normally find only in high-minded sit-down pizzerias like Sorbillo, Ops or Una Pizza Napoletana.

Those bloodhounds who follow the city’s melted-mozzarella trail will recognize that Mama’s Too is part of a great reawakening of slice culture. Unlike brick-oven pizza, which came from Europe and relied on preindustrial technology, the New York slice is a lowly American hybrid. It is baked in gas ovens, and the sheer number of places selling it suggests that it requires no special skill. When it is praised, we don’t talk about its artisanal roots; we call it the humble slice, the street-corner slice, the slice of the common man and woman.

The ordinary slice and its heftier cousin, the Sicilian-style square, were probably first rehabilitated with superior ingredients and a sophisticated understanding of baking by Best Pizza in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2010. Today, serious pizza hobbyists talk about their favorite slices by reeling off the dough’s rising time and hydration levels. North Brooklyn is still the center of the neoclassical slice movement, with L’Industrie and Williamsburg Pizza and, most recently, Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, but the forward-thinking slice is found in Manhattan, too, at Scarr’s on the Lower East Side and Corner Slice in the Gotham West Market.

The goal of the neoclassicists is, essentially, to return to the golden age of New York takeout pizza, which survives at places like Di Fara in Midwood, Brooklyn, one of the holy sites of the neoclassical church. Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop, Scarr’s and other neoclassicist joints cultivate a self-consciously vintage atmosphere, styling their logos and signs and interiors so they look like a place where Johnny Boy and Charlie in “Mean Streets” might have gone for a pepperoni slice and a Coke.

Mr. Tuttolomondo does not fetishize the past. Perhaps this is because he lived it. For almost 60 years his family has owned a series of old-school slice joints in the neighborhood. The current incarnation is literally on a street corner, at the intersection of 106th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. It is called Mama’s Pizza. He didn’t open Mama’s Too a block away to outdo his parents; he’s bringing their product into a new era. If the neoclassicists are like the folk revivalists who collected old acoustic 78s, he is Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

When Mama’s Too opened in December, it also served housemade pasta. It’s still on the menu board that hangs on one wall, but Mr. Tuttolomondo has stopped serving it to concentrate on pizza. Besides the house slice, he also makes squares that he sees as a marriage of rectangular Sicilian pizza with Roman pizza al taglio. The crust is much taller than the Roman style, and taller than some Sicilians, too, but it is airy and chewy. On the bottom it has the bronze color, the cratered surface and the pan-fried crunch of the bread on a grilled cheese sandwich. The edges, where the dough meets the pan, have a gold fringe of browned cheese, known among students of pizza styles as a “frico crust.” This fringe is, of course, crunchy and delicious.

The most impressive square is, I think, the pepperoni. Unlike most of the others, it incorporates tomato sauce. The mozzarella is baked until it begins to brown. The pepperoni slices are small and concave, like contact lenses made of meat. Crunchy around the rims, these little cups are half-filled with spicy red oil.

It may sound as if I approached this slice with cool, analytical detachment. The truth is I ripped into it like a pack of hyenas.

The other squares tend to be white pies with toppings. Again, tomato sauce is one of the toppings. In one case it’s a thick and creamy layer of vodka sauce, one of the ideas that separates Mama’s Too from the neoclassicists. Mr. Tuttolomondo also makes a cacio e pepe Sicilian pie, essentially a four-cheese pizza in which one of the cheeses is pecorino; the whole slice hums with black pepper. The square topped with Gorgonzola dolce and pears works in a way that combination often doesn’t, although half a slice was enough for me.

The shop is small, and if you sit at one of the handful of red counter stools you will share the small tiled floor up front with neighbors waiting for takeout and delivery guys. There are no vintage soda refrigerators or letterboard signs, but there is a small photograph of Robert De Niro eating pizza and a much bigger one of John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever,” biting into his double-decker slice. The picture is in black and white except for the pizza. Tinted orange and red, it glows like a beacon.