The wooden booths easily seat six (if there's eight make them very good friends) at New Haven's Modern Apizza on State Street right off I-91's Exit Four.
Crowded booths are de rigeur here: families, college people, couples and all manner of locals. Yankee baseball caps abound: they smell a winner, no doubt. The place is booming most of the time. Take-out (203 776 5306) brings in a steady stream of people hauling out two or three large pies per order. A scan of the tabletops is revealing: each and every booth on a recent run was covered with pizzas. Each and every one. No grinders or spaghetti, while on the menu, were in evidence.
The Modern. It's on the other side of the tracks from Wooster Street's famous Three Powers (Pepe's, the Spot/Annex, and Sally's). The red awning out front proclaims: "brick oven pizza". We go with the standard order: large, garlic, sausage and a couple of drinks and note the surroundings. Physically, it's a large pizzeria, at least the same size as Pepe's, maybe larger. It's got a bunch of beer signs in the windows and there is parking in a lot on the building's south side. It a must-visit for anyone on the East Coast who considers themselves pie cognoscenti, AKA pizzaouli.
A spacious kitchen is cranking 'em out.
Back when pizza was emerging from the cities into America's WASP white-bread national consciousness, the Italians dominated the category. The Greek pie makers hadn't much market share back in the late fifties (when I first began chucking down pie in a pre-professional manner), at least not in my region of the state.
Stores down along Hartford's (river) Front Street, its original Italian neighborhood or ghetto now paved, unused and called "Constitution Plaza", once advertised pizza, la pizza and apizza. The latter is pronounced "abeets" but with a tiny -- just - barely-spoken-- "uh" after the "beets", a very tiny "uh". So maybe we write it thus: "Abeet s uh ." Close to that, anyway. Consult your local Italian pal for the proper way to say it.
So the Modern is something of a throwback: proper brick ovens, large wooden booths, and plenty of take out. Bringing back or retaining the use of the original "Apizza". A nice touch. Shows depth, and some historical reverence for those who came before us in the pizza-loving business.
Our pie is delivered promptly (14 minutes from order to delivery), and it's aromatic and quite pretty in the classic pizza format. Crisp darkened perimeter, very thin crust, large gobs of sausage amidst yellow-white mozzarella (which we call mozza or mozzarelle).
It's clearly of the many-napkin style, my favorite: the sort of pie and crust that won't win any Wedge Tests for crispness but compensates with sauce and cheese and meat, all of which wants to cover your fingers and slide down your chin(s).
Gooey. Messy. Sloppy. The stuff runs down your hands into your shirtsleeves. Perfect! And the sauce, while not too spicy, is tasty and delicious. Not terribly memorable but entirely wonderful. The crust is crisp on outer edge but soon enough yields to the volumes of sauce and cheese and such on the top, sogging it down but a victory for any pizza-lover nonetheless.
The sausage is abundant. Not too greasy, it may be a bit too fennel-ated for some palates, so you may wish to sample a chunk before you order it for the whole pizza. Screw it: ask to taste a piece. It's tangy and good, but again, heavy on the licorice taste, which some won't prefer.
The garlic is invisible to the casual eye-ball. But oh it's in there. Chunks of the stuff. Freshly cut. A fine addition to all pies no matter the lineup you require atop your product(s).
Eyeball factor: (on a scale of 20/20 -- see Connecticrust Vol. 2) this pie rates 16 on the beauty scale, but an 18 on the delivering the goods/taste scale. Very high. (Your chain pies come in around 10/10 or in the good stores 12/13 or so).
Modern Apizza. It's got more room to hang out and have fun with a large party than Sally's or certainly the Spot / Annex, and parking is way easier over here on the west side of I-91 and the aforementioned railroad tracks.
While there are no photos of Frank Sinatra or letters from Presidents Bush or Clinton on the walls, they do have one signed photo at the take out window...Willie Nelson.
If it is good enough for the redheaded stranger, can you be far off the mark?