Pizza tours Offer a Chance to Explore the City's Favorite Food
New York City has over 2,000 pizzerias. Each one is unique, featuring their own pizza style, recipes, ingredients, and history. Thanks to Scott's Pizza Tours, founded by Scott Wiener in 2008, everyday New Yorkers and tourists can explore a variety of city neighborhoods while tasting and learning about some of their best pizza. Each tour is led by enthusiastic tour guides who have a passion for pizza and a goal of educating the public about the history of pizza and its complexity. Scott’s Pizza Tours has been featured in multiple well-known shows and publications, including LIVE with Kelly and Ryan, the Food Network, the Travel Channel, and Oprah magazine.
Currently Scott’s offers five locations for walking pizza tours, including three in Manhattan, located in Greenwich Village, West Village, and East Village, and two in Brooklyn, located in Williamsburg and Downtown Brooklyn. Each walking tour is two and a half hours long and consists of three pizzerias, three slices, and one mile of walking. While getting a chance to explore neighborhoods that may have previously been unknown to them, participants learn more about the origins of pizza, its ingredients, and the ways in which it is cooked. For example, pizza ovens can often reach temperatures as high as 950℉, allowing the pizza to cook in just a minute and twenty seconds.
At the start of the tour, a small notebook known as the “Pocket Pizza Journal” is handed out to every participant to record their observations about nearly every aspect of their pizza. There are graphics to indicate toppings, crust thickness, and the cheese-to-sauce ratio, along with places to rate each aspect of the pizza and its overall quality. The notebook even includes space to draw the slice or pie of pizza and a small ruler to measure the crust’s thickness. Participants can classify the pizza’s cheese in a variety of ways, including greasy, stringy, smoky, creamy or salty. They can classify the pizza’s sauce as sweet, savory, tangy, spicy or thin, and the crust as buttery, crispy, spongy, chewy or bubbly. This aspect of the tour allows participants to truly unpack the flavors of pizza and explore its various textures and qualities. Additionally, the tour encourages people to engage with pizza and to understand it in an intricate way. The back of the journal includes a pizza dough recipe so that participants can enjoy creating their own pizza at home after going on the tour.
The Downtown Brooklyn tour visits the pizzerias Sottocasa, Luzzo’s, and Table 87, which has been featured on Shark Tank. This tour explores a variety of pizza styles and specifically compares the Napolitana (Naples-style pizza) and New York styles. Table 87, the last stop on this tour, is unique as it is both a traditional New York City pizzeria, serving pizza by the slice, and a sit-down restaurant. Behind the counter where slices are served, there is always a talented pizzaiolo (pizza maker) preparing the pizza, tossing the dough up in the air, and spinning it on their fingers to stretch it out. If you have a sweet tooth, this pizzeria even sells a nutella pizza with marshmallows and strawberries as toppings.
In addition to walking tours, Scott’s Pizza Tours offers bus tours, which visit at least two city boroughs and four pizzerias, and virtual pizza classes, in which participants learn to make pizza from scratch. More information regarding purchasing tickets and the details of each tour can be found on the company’s website and calendar. Additionally, on the website viewers can contact employees to schedule private tours or ask questions and have access to the company’s store and blog, which contains a number of interesting stories and experiences. Overall, Scott’s Pizza Tours is a fun and delicious experience where participants can discover some of the city’s best pizzerias and gain an in-depth understanding of this popular food.
