A Fancy Slice For Drunk Kids
Cello's Pizza is a luxury slice at the center of the East Village party scene.
Welcome to Pizza Tasting Chronicles, my take on the pizza review. I eat a lot of pizza. I have a lot of opinions about pizza. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Cello’s Pizzeria projects an air of eternity. A vintage-style pizzeria sign over the door is reminiscent of classic slice joints from the 1960s and 1970s, but it's only been in the location for about a year.
Cello's replaced St. Mark's Pizza which was a rebrand of Funzi's Pizzeria, another modern throwback pizza joint with a 1980s interior that had been in the spot less than a year. The location has had a high turnover with Oh K Dog, a Korean hot dog spot before Funzi's, and in 2019, Joe's Steam Rice Roll. It was even a pizzeria, Totale Pizza, fifteen years ago.
The pizzaiolo behind Cello's, James Jaworski, worked at Funzi's and L'Industrie. The pedigree shows in the slices which come out well-done, much like L'Industrie, and appealing to the TikTok generation who's idea of good food is how many likes a video of it gets.
I've always found that the East Village is particularly tough for decent slices. There are a few older pizzerias that are kind of mid and overpriced, and cheap places hawking dollar slices. Every slice available after 8pm tasted like regret.
Cello's is much better than that. It's easily the best slice within a five block radius of St. Marks place. The crust is thin and crispy, and the flavors of the sauce are good. It's a little sweet but balanced out by the cheese sprinkled on top, which is either Romano or very bad quality Parmesan.
The slice was a bit darker than it probably should have been. The crusty bits had a tad too much char, and the perimeter crust was big and bloated. The char brings a strong flavor, but maybe too much of a good thing. The bloated edge of the crust is shorting each slice of sauce and cheese, and even though the slice is in, its tastes like too much bread.
That's really the failure here. At $4 and change for a slice, I don't want to be tossing crust into the trash, but there's too much bread. There's simply way too much of it on each slice.
And the pepperoni slice was a bit too light on pepperoni. A good pepperoni slice should taste like the pepperoni oil even when you don’t bite into the meat. The sparsely spread pepperoni didn't really yield enough oily goodness on the slice. This is the fault of the peperoni rather than the pizza.
There are some other fancy toppings too, like vodka sauce and of course you can get a slice topped with burrata. The obsession with topping pizza with burrata has convinced me we should ban TikTok. K
I appreciate that Cello's is available for late night drinking. It's a gourmet slice in a sea of cheap eats. But it feels a bit like a tourist trap rather than a neighborhood pizza joint, like it wants to be a scene. The price seems a bit high for drunk eating, but then again I remember when $4 got you a beer, tip, and change.
Cello’s Pizza
36 St Mark’s Place
Manhattan