Depression Era Pizza Champ

Few gentlemen of leisure have the taste to appreciate the unsparkled pleasure of what your grandmother would call a bargain. Your grandmother, a person who has had the time to see hardship, has the wisdom to be satisfied by frugality just for the sake of it. That is why she and I enjoy ourselves at Two Brothers Pizza, a proliferating Manhattan pizza chain famed for its one dollar pizza slice. One dollar, no more no less, for a plain slice. Two dollars and seventy five cents for two slices and a soda. How can you beat that?! Grandma would say, “You can’t. Not in these times.” And she would be right.

Now before I go any further with my unpaid ad campaign for Two Brothers Pizza, I would like to point out the obvious (reasonable?) defects of the working man’s pizza. The slices are slightly smaller than the average New York slice. The pizza itself is nothing to scream about. It is merely good, significantly better than frozen pizza, with the crust a little on the soft side. The shops themselves are about as bare bones as you can get. Two Brothers is for the in-and-out diner; none of this sit-down chit chat business. Two Brothers is not a great place for your next business lunch, but if you were ordering for a party…

Also, and I only say this because it’s New York City, and because as Americans we live in a time where absolutely no business can be taken at face value, I accept that it’s entirely possible that Two Brothers is a front for some other kind of seediness that I’m not going to take any pains to uncover. If someone wants to pull some Woodward-and-Bernstein shit and ruin cheap pizza for everyone, then that’s their ticket. What grandma and I don’t know isn’t hurting us.

I go to the stand on ninth avenue right next to the Port Authority. Different from the three other stands I know of, this stand has a fried chicken bar with string beans and macaroni and cheese, all in the same price range of the pizza. I usually get two slices and a cherry coke before I take my bus to PA. I like to eat over the tables where you stand. Standing there, usually next to some businessman or bus driver, I like to look at all the different kinds of people that go there—high school kids, homeless guys, old ladies, and on a warm day, a Port Authority prostitute. This is when I forgive Two Brothers for everything it might appear to be—a front, a grease pit, a corporate chain.

If it’s a front, the money is for people as poor as the ones buying the pizza. If it’s a grease pit, the grease is cheap, and a soda for seventy five cents! If it’s a corporate chain, the chain is at least local to New York; no Super Bowl ad space for Two Brothers yet. The bareness of the interior becomes an absolution from heartless, bullshit eateries that charge extra for the stylized mystique of its own brand. I don’t have time or money for mystique. I am hungry. And when I am hungry, really hungry, I like to eat.