A lot of transplants to the City look for yardsticks to measure the moment when they become legitimate “New Yorkers.” Here’s an easy one: do you order Domino’s by choice, and not just out of necessity at 4am after a night of hard drinking? If so, rest easy, you’re still a Michigander. If there’s one thing every native New Yorker can agree on, its that everyone else’s pizza is terrible. Really terrible. Get two New Yorkers together doing time at a Turkish prison, and in about five minutes they’ll start bonding over the lousy pizza in Istanbul. So why are we so particular about our pizza? Is it just because we invented the American variety? Well, no. We invented underground transit, but no one in their right mind would argue that our system is the most efficient. Or the cleanest.  Although, if you’re away from the city for too long you do start to miss that subway smell; a unique combination of burnt ozone and urine not to be found anywhere else in the world. At least not anyplace that I’ve ever been. And I’ve been a lot of places. If you know of a place, drop us a line. The real reason is that the city that, even after 30 years of deep scrubbing, is still one of the filthiest, as if the grime of its seedy past just won’t ever give up the ghost completely, lucked into some of the world’s best water. Coming down from the Catskills, and naturally low in limestone content, New York water has a PH level of 7.2. “Pure” water has a PH level of 7.0. So, through an accident of geology, New York water is naturally close to perfect. Weird, right? No wonder then that when we try anything dough based in a foreign land–like say, Los Angeles–it sends us scurrying right back to our overpriced cubicles, resigned to forever forego sunshine in exchange for a good bagel. Even Angelenos won’t drink the toxic brew of cow manure and Roundup that passes for tap water out that way. So what kind of pizza are you going to get from it? Not a very good one. And besides that, what’s with the duck and pineapple toppings? That’s just an unforced error, right there. But its still not as bad as that time I had a slice in London that was covered in corn kernels. That’s right. Corn kernels. Not even fresh corn kernels. From a can. The horror. The horror . . . -Russ

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