Why Foods of NY Tours Is the Best Food Tour Company in NYC
There are currently 4 parts to this blog series. If you haven’t read Parts 1–3, please read those before reading Part 4.
Part 4
Surprise! Surprise!
A week after I went into NYC on my own, I asked the same three friends from the first two trips if they wanted to go back to the Village on Saturday. They said yes. We met at the train station at 10:00 a.m., took the ride into Penn Station, and couldn’t wait to get there. I still hadn’t told them I’d made the trip to NYC alone the week before.
As soon as we hit the Village, we went straight to Joe’s Pizza. The guy behind the counter looked up, recognized me, and said, “You’re back! Good to see you!” I said hello to him, and my friends didn’t question it. We grabbed our slices and ate outside at a table. Delicious as usual!
After pizza, I took my friends to Rocco’s for cannoli. When the cannoli’s arrived at the table, I decided to tell my friends what I’d learned. I said, “These are probably the best cannoli you’ve ever had. They fill the shell when you order them. They don’t fill them ahead of time and leave them sitting in the refrigerated case.” One of my friends looked at me and asked, “How do you know that?” That’s when I told them I’d come into the Village alone the Saturday before to do some research.
They all just stared at me for a second and asked, “Why?” I told them I was obsessed with Greenwich Village and the food shops on Bleecker Street. I knew none of you wanted to research all the places we found, and they all agreed. They also knew, even back then, that I loved food more than they did.
Next stop was Zito’s Bread Shop, the place I’d been waiting to show them all week. I’d been hoping Charlie and his brothers would be there and that they’d remember me. As we walked in, Jimmy Zito was behind the counter smoking a cigarette. He spotted me and yelled into the back, “Charlie—your friend from NJ is back, and he brought his friends!” Charlie came out, remembered my name, and smiled. Then he asked if I’d brought my friends to see the ovens.
I told him I wanted my friends to meet him and his brothers—and I wanted them to taste some pizza. Charlie laughed, grabbed a tray, and handed each of us a slice. He said, “It’s not pizza. It’s focaccia.” None of us had any idea what that was. We just looked at it and figured it was Sicilian pizza.
The woman who’d been there the week before came over and said, I made the tomato sauce for that focaccia, I hope you like it. They served it at room temperature, and it was light, airy, and tangy, nothing like the heavy, gummy Sicilian slices we were used to back in New Jersey. It looked similar (a thick rectangle), but it was completely different.
Then Charlie led us down into the basement and showed my friends the ovens. He introduced us to the bakers, and they showed us what they did. We were 15 years old, standing under an 1890s tenement building in NYC, staring at a huge oven built right into the foundation. My friends couldn’t believe what they were seeing. I couldn’t either, and I couldn’t believe we were even there. The best part was the look on Charlie’s face: a big smile, proud to show us what he and his brothers had built. When we came back upstairs, he handed each of us a loaf of Italian bread to take home.
The only problem was we couldn’t take the bread home, our parents had no idea we were in NYC, and the bag gave us away: “Zito’s Bread Shop,” printed right on it with the address. There was no hiding that. So we did the only thing we could do, we ate as much as possible while we walked the around the Village, tearing pieces off and loving each bite. A few hours later, we ran into Charlie, and he asked why we were eating the bread. We told him it was too good not to, and we wanted it while it was still warm and fresh.
As the day went on, my friends kept circling back to the same thing: me, alone in the Village, the week before. They couldn’t believe I’d taken the trip on my own just to walk Bleecker Street and research food shops. When I told them I’d even taken notes, they asked, “Why?” I told them I was going to live in the Village one day and I needed to know everything about these places. They said, “What are you going to do here?” Of course, I had no idea—I just knew I needed to live here someday.
I walked them into Murray’s and then over to John’s Pizza. They thought both spots were cool in an understated way. John’s was a place we all agreed that we had to come back and try. Back then, we didn’t even know what brick-oven pizza was—we just knew it sounded cool.
And because my friends loved music, I made sure we went to a few record shops I’d discovered on my last trip in. That was the part that really impressed my friends. We sifted through crates of records and found some great used ones for a dollar each. We each bought a few and left happy. The record stores got my friends more excited than the food shops did. If I wanted to keep dragging them to places to eat, I needed to balance out the day with other things to do.
None of us, me included, had any idea what kinds of adventures were waiting for us over the next 20 years!
Part 5 of will be out soon. In the meantime, please check out our food tours.
Thank you for reading Part 4!
Todd Lefkovic
Foods of NY Tours