Philomena's Serves the Best New York City Slice You Haven't Heard Of
The question, “Where’s your favorite slice in New York City?” just got harder to answer.
I've eaten pizza 250 times in 2019—nearly 600 slices at 160 places in New York, New Jersey, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Detroit, Connecticut, Boston, Ohio, Kentucky, and Maryland in search of some of America's most significant slices.
“You bite into this slice and your mind races to compare it to the last great slice you can remember, and then childhood.”
I should have just gone to Queens. Philomena’s in Sunnyside to be precise.
If you're unfamiliar with Queens' geography, Sunnyside is just east of Long Island City. It's nestled in between Astoria and Woodside, just a 15-minute ride on the 7 train from Grand Central Station, far closer than pizza pilgrimages like Totonno’s, L&B, and Di Fara, and I’d argue, unquestionably better.
The squares are the reason the shop, opened in December of 2018, exists. “I started doing the slices to have something I could serve that was up in the display in between working on the squares,” owner and pizza maker Dave Acocella explained.
But these slices are anything but an “and.” It may be the best slice I’ve had in New York City all year. Displayed on 18-inch pans, the slices may be a little shorter than that. They’re a tick smaller than your typical New York City slice, but they pack a punch of flavor.
It’s a slice that folds and that doesn’t leave you chewing on crust that as good as it may be, is left onstage solo, dryly performing a lead role.
Like new artisanal slice shops F & F, Upside, and Paulie Gee’s, Philomena’s has a very thin crust but here there’s a juicy mix of cheese and tangy, garlic- and salt-accented sauce that’s about equal to the thin crust underneath it. While still in a balanced ratio, it’s a bit of a wetter, cheesier slice than those others, fitting for a borough that’s home to Amore and Gloria. In the Gotham slice scene it probably most resembles the heralded slices at Brooklyn’s L’Industrie but it feels a bit more New York-ish.
The cornicione rises about three quarters of an inch, a mix of browns and beiges with the scattered leopard-spotting of a Neapolitan pie. The undercarriage has the dusty grays, white-powdered slates and light browns of museum marble statues and parchment. The result is a slice that folds, that doesn’t leave you chewing on crust that as good as it may be, is left onstage solo, dryly performing a lead role.
The undercarriage has the dusty grays, white-powdered slates and light browns of museum marble statues and parchment.
You bite into this slice and your mind races to compare it to the last great slice you can remember and then childhood. I hopscotched in my mind to an eye-rollingly good slice at Philadelphia’s Shackamaxon earlier this year, and then to 1981, to a five-year-old me eating a slice at Violeta’s (long since closed) on Long Island’s South Shore.
Two bites in I was already thinking about when I could have another. That ended up being after two squares.
This all comes together from a starter Acocella has been nourishing for seven years. It’s a 70% hydration dough that he says he adds a little Baker’s yeast to (“The starter by itself is a bit temperamental so I have to control it a bit with commercial yeast,” he explained). He uses Grande whole-milk low-moisture mozzarella and Alta Cucina tomatoes for the sauce.
O.G. slice seeker Adam Kuban recently featured the pizzeria in his Instagram feed and Queens food fixer and guide Joe DiStefano recently included Philomena’s in a Grub Street list of “The Absolute Best Restaurants in Sunnyside and Woodside” but there’s been remarkably little else written about this shop opened by Acocella and named for one of his twin daughters (“I have another daughter by the name of Apollonia, who I promised if we did good, she’d have her own restaurant,” he notes). He opened in Sunnyside because he lives there and wanted to be close to his family, “So they could come and visit and I’d see them once a week.”
Pizza people, among them specifically Serhan Ayhan of Boston Pizza, have been DM’ing about Philomena’s as a place that is under the radar doing fantastic stuff for months now. It reminds me of buzz I was hearing about a little pizzeria in New Jersey that I “should visit” called Razza two years before it was blown up by restaurant critic Pete Wells of The New York Times (Is New York’s Best Pizza in New Jersey?).
The man behind Philomena’s, Dave Acocella, is a one-man show, usually working at the shop for 18 hours a day. Acocella, who said he’s 75% Neapolitan and 25% Sicilian, is soft-spoken and earnest, graying and friendly. He looks up from under the glasses that slip down his nose under the trucker cap he wears while working behind the counter. He fell in love with squares while visiting Italy. Philomena’s represents the culmination of his pizza dreams.
When he responded to my request for clarifications it was 6:24 am and he’d been there all night working, about to head home for a few hours sleep before starting all over again. Acocella is the former restaurant manager of the now-closed, iconic Italian West Village celeb magnet Da Silvano. He apprenticed at Paulie Gee’s where he worked with Drew Brown (“Who taught me how to roll,” he said), who now helms Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop). He also worked within the Sorbillo restaurant family, one of Italy’s most popular Neapolitan pizzas at the Mulberry Street location for most of 2017, learning from and working with Genaro Rapido, “Sorbillo’s right-hand man,” Acocella said. “‘Rapido,’ I’m guessing is his nickname because he was so incredibly fast. Wow! You should see him roll dough.”
Complimenting Acocella’s own pizza pedigree, Adam Kuban recently noted that at Sorbillo, he was the first Italian-American allowed to make pizza there—as opposed to born-and-raised Naples natives. “They told me not to open my mouth,” Acocella told Kuban, “for fear my American accent would give me away.”
A Margherita square at Philomena’s.
Acocella took the bullet train to Rome from Naples and ate “amazing pizza” at Bonci’s Pizzarium, then returned a few days later to see if it was really that good. “It was actually better the second time. He blew me away. Wow, such an amazing pizza.”
I’ve gone on the record as saying I’m not a huge fan of the Roman-inspired squares that have been proliferating across New York City over the past two years. I’m just generally not into pizza that seems designed, or at least destined, to sit around. But Philomena’s squares (90% hydration)—the reason the shop exists—are so light as to be in danger of flying away.
There are seven on a rotation Acocella changes up once in a while. “There are a few that I’ll put out towards the weekend like the escarole and zucchini pies,” and there’s a Yukon potato square simply topped with oregano, salt, and olive oil, inspired by a grilled potato pie his mother used to make, that would win a staring contest with the most meticulously layered French galette.
Acocella has poured over everything he’s been able to read that’s been written by Jim Lahey, Rose Levy Beranbaum, Gabriele Bonci, Ken Forkish, and Chad Robertson. He singled out Maggie Glezer’s Artisan Baking Across America and Tony Gemignani’s Pizza Bible, “Which is in shreds I’ve combed through it so many times.”
But he credits L’Industrie’s Massimo Laveglia for helping him reach the quality he was shooting for. “The square was my hobby, more of a challenge in terms of understanding the process of making the dough,” he explained. “I made so many pies and came up with something I thought was pretty good. But in 2017, I brought some of my dough to Massimo and we did a bunch of test pies. He baked it in a blue steel pan and had great results after some tinkering. There’s a picture of that pie on my Instagram page. I was so proud to have done that collaboration with Massimo. He makes a beautiful pizza.”
As good as it is, Philomena’s is still somehow a secret. Why? Is it the perceived distance, inconvenience, or “stigma” of Queens? Walking out of the shop, I realized that I’d been in the space years ago when it was the award-winning buzzy Korean restaurant Salt & Fat. Back then, getting to Sunnyside from the East Village felt like traveling light years uphill. This time, I was cheered to know how close by my new crush was. Philomena’s is a wormhole to a pizza cognition slice—a slice that presses pause, that makes a city, this city, feel like a neighborhood.
I get asked by pros, putterers, and peripatetics where I’ve been that’s great lately or just where to go.
Go here.
Philomena’s Pizza — philomenasqueens.com
41-16 Queens Blvd Sunnyside
(718) 255-1778
The potato square at Philomena’s would win a staring contest with the most meticulously layered French galette.
