| |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Asbury Park Press
Deeper into Brooklyn
A relaxing bus tour showcases neighborhoods, movie locations and historic pizzerias
BY GEORGE OXFORD MILLER
CORRESPONDENT
Our tour bus slowly cruises down 89th Street in Brooklyn while the opening credits for the 1977 movie "Saturday Night Fever" roll on the video monitor.
The crowded sidewalks and storefronts outside the bus windows seem to merge with the scene on the monitor as a very young John Travolta walks down the same busy street. Travolta stops at Linney's Pizza for two slices just as we drive past the pizzeria. We could be in a time warp or a movie set. Then, Travolta turns into the Shirt World store and reality returns. The corner storefront is now a McDonald's.
Clips of movies filmed in Brooklyn are just one of the tasty features of our Slice of Brooklyn bus tour. The other is pizza.
"We're going to sample pizza and see Brooklyn from one side to another," Tony Muia, who designed the tour, promises when we board the bus at Union Square in Manhattan. Besides my wife, Carole, and myself from New Jersey, our group of 10 hails from Ohio, Florida, Boston, and the Bronx.
Leaving Manhattan, we drive through Little Italy, where the first pizzeria in America opened in 1905. We cross over the East River toward Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge. As we look across the river at the Brooklyn Bridge, Muia cues the bus CD player and Frank Sinatra sings "The Brooklyn Bridge" from the 1947 movie "It Happened in Brooklyn."
The song and view of the historic bridge set the stage nicely for our half-day, insiders' tour of the city's second largest borough, after Manhattan. Though it's home to world-famous Coney Island, the New York Aquarium, Brooklyn Botanic Garden and 526-acre Prospect Park, Brooklyn doesn't register in the minds of tourists the way Manhattan does as a glamorous, fun destination.
Muia aims to change that. The 41-year-old former respiratory therapist quit health care in March to launch his tour business. As a second-generation Italian, he often travels back to his homeland.
"I like to ask locals where to eat," he says. "I make a lot of friends that way and invite them to visit me. Some have and I take them around Brooklyn. I realized that no tours really show the Brooklyn I grew up in and love. So, I took the two things I know best -- Brooklyn and pizza -- and came up with the tour."
Bus and walking tours of Manhattan abound. Our hotel, the Affinia Manhattan across from Madison Square Garden, even provides guests with free "Experience New York" kits that include guide books and CD players with audio tours. But the Slice of Brooklyn tour is the only tour of Brooklyn that picks up visitors in Manhattan. The Union Square rendezvous point is a quick subway ride from the Affinia Manhattan Hotel and most of uptown.
'Scent of a Woman'
After crossing the Manhattan Bridge, we cruise through DUMBO, the neighborhood known as Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Muia plays scenes from "Scent of a Woman" and "Coming to America" as we pass corners and views featured in those movies. We wind through the cobblestone streets to our first stop, the Empire Fulton Ferry State Park, which connects the shoreline between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges.
We drive to the other end of the park and stop at the Old Fulton Street docks below the Brooklyn Bridge for one of the best views of the Manhattan skyline. A water taxi unloads a group that heads down the block to Grimaldi's Pizzeria, rated best in New York City by Zagat Survey six years in a row. We follow along for our first taste of the signature food of Brooklyn.
Grimaldi's, a small mom-pop storefront, serves Neapolitan-style pizza cooked in a coal-fired, brick oven at 600 degrees. The Grimaldi family has been making pizza since 1941 and the store has been on Old Fulton Street since 1990.
The story, glory of pizza
As we wait for our order, Muia explains the origins of pizza.
"The Greeks ate food baked on flat, round bread 1,000 years ago, so the idea isn't new. Pizza was a popular street food in Naples in the 1830s. Queen Margherita loved peasant food and requested pizza when she visited Naples in 1889.
"The city's most famous pizza chef, Raffaele Esposito, created the Margherita pizza with the colors of the Italian flag. He used tomatoes for red, mozzarella cheese for white and basil leaves for green. He was the first to combine tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese on a pizza shell."
Store manager Chris Grimaldi brings three Margherita pizzas and we dig in. The thin-crust pies are topped with fresh sliced mozzarella and crushed tomatoes and sprinkled with whole basil leaves. Various toppings are available, but we sample the original recipe. The crushed tomatoes have very little spice, so the fresh tomato flavor dominates.
"This is my favorite part of the tour" says Frank Sanchez Jr., 13, of the Bronx, who joined the tour with his father Frank Sr.
"We live so close to Brooklyn, but I didn't know much about it, so we signed up for the tour," Frank Sr. says.
He takes a bite of pizza and smiles. "I'm used to Manhattan pizza, but this is better. It's great to try different types for comparison."
John Travolta does the talking
From our table, we can see the cook preparing pizzas and sliding them into the oven on a large wooden paddle.
"I can't tell you how many neighborhood pizzerias are in Brooklyn," Muia says. "You can step in any and get good pizza -- and all styles. Neapolitan is always round and Sicilian is square with a thick crust. We'll sample that at our next stop."
We follow Shore Road along the riverside greenbelt lined with million-dollar mansions to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Instead of quoting a list of gee-whiz facts about the bridge, Muia cues a scene from "Saturday Night Fever" and lets star John Travolta do the talking. The bus parks in a spot matching the same camera angle as the movie, while Travolta's character tries to impress his girlfriend with his knowledge of the bridge.
Muia can't resist his native-son pride as we cruise through the neighborhoods of his youth.
"I'm as Brooklyn as they come," he says. "My brothers are named Vinny and Joey, so you know I'm Italian."
Then, he explains about "stoop etiquette," which stipulates that the owner always sits on the top step, and about playing stoop ball, bouncing a ball off the steps, for hours at a time as a kid.
Savor the flavor
At L&B Spumoni Gardens, we park behind a Hummer stretch limo with seven darkened windows and a Lexus limo that's five-windows long.
"The locals know where to bring the VIPs for the best pizza," Muia says.
Ludovico Barbati started selling spumoni and Italian ices from a horse-drawn cart in 1939. When he opened the restaurant, he added Sicilian-style pizza to the menu. Now, L&B is a full-course Italian restaurant, but pizza and spumoni are still the main attractions.
We sit in the outside garden and savor the flavor of the thick crust and rich sauce. Unlike most pizza, the rich layer of spicy sauce covers the cheese. The crunchy crust adds just the right consistency to the combination. I limit myself to two slices and get in line for the spumoni.
L&B sells three flavors of the frozen treat: vanilla, chocolate, pistachio and rainbow with the three mixed. Unlike spumoni frozen so hard that you have to slice it, this is as smooth as ice cream and just as rich. People double park on the street to run in for a cone.
We conclude the tour with a walk on an all-time Brooklyn classic, the Coney Island Boardwalk. We pass the original 1916 Nathan's Hotdog stand, the 150-foot tall Wonder Wheel Ferris wheel and the 1927 vintage Cyclone roller coaster, which still zooms at speeds of 68 mph.
"I liked how personalized it was," says Janet Rumble of Jacksonville, Fla. "Tony wasn't reading from a script. You could tell how much he loves his town."
"Tony has a relaxed, accommodating style," adds Peter Mitchell, a teacher from Boston. "Combining the movies, music and pizza was a great idea and very creative. He showed us a side of Brooklyn you would never find on your own. He made Brooklyn seem very accessible."
back to press page |
|
As featured on the Today Show, the Food Network, the Travel Channel, the Rachael Ray Show, Martha Stewart Living
and in the pages of Travel & Leisure, the London Times, the New York Times, Frommers and the Lonely Planet Guide!
|
|
|
|
|
