There are a lot of rules for making it in New York City. Half of them are food related, and half of those apply to pizza. You could say that we’ve got a lot of doughs and dough-nots. Do not even think about eating your pizza with a knife and fork should you want to run for office some day, for example, and to-go slices must be folded to increase portability. And “cheese?” Never heard of her. Should you wish to order the combination of crust, tomato sauce, and mozzarella, that’s just regular, baby.
But to be serious for one moment, what you might have thought of as cheese pizza before your enlightenment is, for all practical purposes, regular. Once you add pepperoni, it becomes a pepperoni pizza. Likewise, mushrooms, sausage, or sweet, divisive pineapple. “Cheese,” instead, is pizza’s neutral state, which makes it literally regular. Consider, say, a glass of premium New York City tap water: Order it in a restaurant and you know exactly what you’re going to get. You have to specify if you want club soda, seltzer, or sparkling water. That plain old cup of H2O, like a pizza topped with only cheese, is the regular upon which all other varieties build.
Other Acceptable Ways To Order Pizza In The Five Boroughs
“Plain” is virtually interchangeable with “regular” to all but an incredibly niche group of culinary obsessives who also dabble in linguistics. These stone-cold people bristle at “plain” because each precious pizza’s carefully crafted recipe, preparation, and even heat source — wood-fired, gas, and coal all have a different finish, not to mention how a brick oven can impact a pizza – are just too nuanced to reduce to “plain” as though it were a common Pringle. But the same principle applies: If a pizza becomes its toppings, as in the case of the aforementioned pepperoni, then “plain” is its neutral state.
Order a slice in any part of the city where tourists stride slowly among locals and you likely hear orders for “regular,” “plain,” and even “cheese” varieties, and businesses more or less continue apace. Neighborhoods less vulnerable to the selfie stick set go with our local lingo because, in New York City, most pizza just comes with cheese as a matter of fact. This isn’t Philadelphia…