New York Pizza and Deli's owners coined a rather clever acronym for their little hole in the wall establishment in downtown Lafayette:
NYPD.
Covers all the letters in the title of the place, save that pesky but oh so necessary article.
So we have NYPD: New York Pizza and Deli.
Having visited the joint, I have a different set of words to plug into that same acronym that I think is a hell of a lot more accurate and avoids the same blatant false advertising:
NYPD: Need Your Patience, Dude.
Exclamation point(s) may be added at your discretion. Especially after you eat there.
I love pizza. Not a big surprise to those who know me. If you'd cut off certain cubes of the fat deposits around my body, you'd probably see they're actually cubes of stored pizza.
It takes a lot to ruin pizza. I've had some terrible pizza in my thirty years and some great, even downright beautiful pizza. The stuff of sonnents and frescoes and arias.
Here's the worst part about the pizza from Need Your Patience, Dude: it's neither terrible or great. And as Jesus put it in the "back of the Bible," like my kids say, we spit the lukewarm out of our mouths.
My bride and I went on a double-date with our friends, Roy and Mindi Petitfils. We got babysitters and were excited to have a night on the town. We decided on trying NYPD, because it was new and we'd all heard good reports.
HUGE mistake. The first thing that should have clued us in that NYPD was going to fail us was the fact that we were the only patrons at five thirty on a Saturday evening. Parlors like Alesi's, which is falling from grace itself, Deano's, Pizza Village, and La Pizzeria, are all seeing brisk business early in the evening on the weekend's longest night. Should have been a red alert for us, but still we stayed.
This guy comes out who could be a waiter there or a guy who works at Sbarro's in the mall and asks for our drink orders. I shoot back with "Whatever you've got of the beer-esque type drinks," and he laughs. LAUGHS. According to that acronym and the all the hype, this joint's a pizza parlor. Yet they have no beer.
I give him the look I give my students when they say they didn't know they had to do something they damn well know they have to do. He says, "Uh, I'm serious, you have to go to one of the bars because blah blee blue blah." I stopped after "You have to go" because I'm thinking, "I don't have to go anywhere. I came here because I wanted to be served. If I wanted to go get my own beer, I'd have stayed home and walked to the fridge in the garage.
So Roy and I do the gentleman's shuffle out the back door of the joint and head to the bar behind it. We get some beers in what may have been either a bar or a set from The Lord of the Rings that was transported to Lafayette and left intact. I half expected to see folks hanging from the walls from manacles. We get the beers, which begin their countdown to being room temperature the minute our hands touch them, and then head back to Need Your Patience, Dude.
Once there, we order the pizza and an appetizer. A whole pizza at NYPD is over twenty bucks because New York pizza is big. I get it, that's the whole schtick of the place, alright. But twenty-three bucks? Please. I could work wonders with that amount with homemade pizzas made from store-bought ingredients. Ali orders two pieces, I order a half, Roy orders a half, and Mindi orders two pieces.
We get the appetizers in advance, which is one good thing. They weren't bad or great, just middle of the road. A taste of things to come.
Then the pizza arrives. I'm the only dark cloud in the room, which now has two more patrons by six-fifteen. And yes, it's still Saturday. I pick up one of the large slices and...lose all of my toppings. Not some. Not a few. ALL. After the Frankensteinian task of rebuilding my pizza is done, I get that first taste. Surely this will redeem the place. Maybe you don't come for a few brews or the atmosphere. Maybe this is a place you come to just for the great...
...then I bite into the pizza. It's mediocre at best. See a pattern forming?
The crust is subpar, the toppings are undercooked, the cheese is so so, and the sauce is struggling to be something more than a can of Ragu with added oregano and tomato paste.
We finish quickly and all realize that we neither got our bang for our buck nor felt the excitement that can come from trying a new place. We thought about going to that wonderful mainstay of Lafayette pizza, Deano's, but didn't.
We probably should have. And so should you. Go anywhere else, in fact. Even the chains like the Hut and Dommie's and Papa J's. At least you'll get what you pay for and you don't have to go to a place so filled with potential (great location, great building) but so off the mark when living up to that potential.
And you'd get your pizza much faster ordering it from the chains, even on a busy Saturday night. We waited almost thirty minutes. That's long even for a busy place like Coyote Blues on a Saturday night. This place had four customers.
There's just no excuse. And that's why from service to selection to affordability to quality, you'll Need Your Patience, Dude.
Cap
