Used to be if you wanted an incredible, edible, egg-topped pizza pie at most places you had to show up for the brunch pies. But the yolk is throwing off its morning yoke and moving into dinner territory. After all, everybody loves a good carbonara and a good pizza—so why not combine the two?
The gist of a carbonara pizza is pretty simple. Take a white pie, add cheese (pecorino most often), pepper, bacon or pancetta and put an egg on top. Let the diner spread the yolk themselves and mangia! The $12 Pizza Alla Carbonara at Forcella, for instance, is pretty much exactly that and is quite good—but it is only available at brunch. Though a few restaurants have been serving similar pies for dinner for some time (Three of Cups in the East Village, for instance), two big names are now taking this to a new level. So! Expect to see a lot more of these pies in the future.
First, we've heard multiple raves for the $19 Carbonara pie made with cream, pancetta, pecorino romano, egg, black pepper, and scallions at Michael "Marea" White's new East Village pizza joint, Nicoletta. And though the cream makes us dubious (cream always seems superfluous in spaghetti carbonara) we're still very interested to give it a shot. Especially since it's on the menu at all times.
The other big addition to the carbonara pizza scene is at Danny Mayer's Maialino in the Gramercy Hotel. As Slice today notes, chef Nick Anderer has started serving a $12, late-night carbonara pizza and a beer special there that sounds pretty amazing:
Anderer smothers on rich Pecorino bechamel sauce and scatters little glistening bits of housemade bacon on top. To prepare the yolk, it first gets submerged in rendered bacon fat and olive oil, then slow-poaches on a really low temperature for 15 minutes to get that ethereal jiggle.
When the slice arrives, the Cyclops yolk stares at you, saying something like, "swirl me all around." So, you do.
All of which is to say, though we thought this was going to be the summer of the fried pizza, maybe we were wrong? And if we were, we aren't complaining—it is pretty hard to not love egg, pig, cheese and dough!
