Sirius XM Podcasts Hey, Sportful family, this is Alejandra calling from Charleston, Illinois.
For 2026, I resolved to eat more grilled cheese.
I had a really good fancy grilled cheese when I lived in Panama City Beach Florida, around 2019, and I haven't had one exactly like that since.
Although last month, when I visited my daughter in Tucson Arizona, we went out to eat and I saw that they had grilled cheese on the menu.
It was not the same, but it was indeed delicious.
Thank you and Happy New Year.
I'm Theo.
I'm from Westport, Connecticut.
And the food I resolved to eat more of in the new year is chicken parmesan, because it absolutely slaps.
And it's so good, but I don't have it enough.
This is Heidi from Sandy, Utah, and my New Year's food resolution is to have more tea parties.
I love tea parties so much, I've been collecting tea cups for over 10 years.
But I need to use them more often.
Tea party foods, which are basically small bite appetizers and desserts, are so much fun.
So in 2026, I resolve to get out those tea cups, bring out the little party foods and invite my friends and family over for afternoon tea.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
And here we are, friends, winding down 2025 with our annual New Year's Spectacular.
The first thing I do for this tradition...
I'm going to sit back in my chair a little bit.
I'm going to relax.
I'm going to take a deep breath.
It's the end of the year.
It's time to slow down.
It's time to slow down.
Now, there are a couple of things that make this episode special.
The first is your New Year's food resolutions.
We just heard a couple.
Theo in Connecticut likes chicken parm.
Theo, you're preaching to the choir here.
Probably one of my top ten foods.
And my wife, Janie, who generally eats kosher style, meaning not mixing meat and dairy, will break that rule for chicken parm.
We're going to hear more of your resolutions.
We're going to replay one of my and the Sporkful team's favorite episodes from the year.
And at the end of the episode, I will grade myself on my 2025 New Year's food resolution and I will reveal my new New Year's food resolution for 2026.
But before all that, let's hear a few more of your resolutions.
Hello, Dan Feshman.
My name is Eline.
I'm 31 and I'm from the Netherlands.
This is maybe a bit of an embarrassing story, but I'm really bad at cooking rice.
Whenever I try to make it, somehow always gets like mushy.
My resolution for the next year is that I learn how to cook rice.
This is Dan from Kuznock, Switzerland.
My New Year's food resolution is to eat more French food.
My husband Derek and I live in Kuznock, about a 75-minute drive to the French border.
Twice a year we drive to France to enjoy a gourmet French meal at a Michelin-recommended restaurant.
We visit some local shops and come home with eight to ten soft French cheeses, some baguettes and a few bottles of wine.
That's our dinner that evening.
We've asked ourselves, why don't we do this more often?
So in 2026 we pledge to make that drive to France more often and enjoy more French food both there and at home.
Hey, Dan.
This is Jennifer L., and I am currently living in Tajikistan.
And as much as I love the people and culture here, I will tell you that what I want to eat more of next year is pork.
It is so hard to find here, and I just, I really miss it.
So that's my plan.
My name is Don Tess from Calgary, Alberta.
I've always liked steak tartare, but for some reason in the last few months I have really dug into it.
And so my resolution for 2026 is to eat more steak tartare.
I've even started an Instagram page.
It's at tartarecontrol.
And I'm hoping to spread the joy of great steak tartare from around the world.
All right, Dan.
In Switzerland you live an hour and 15 minutes from the French border and you go to France twice a year.
I would like go for a drink.
But also, Don in Canada, Tartar Control is a phenomenal name for your Instagram feed.
And I'm with you, Steak Tartar is amazing.
Although, you know, getting the seasoning right...
It is tough.
I actually had some steak tartare in Rome this fall, and I thought, oh, it's going to be phenomenal.
I had had a beef carpaccio the year before that was one of the best things I ate in 2024.
This tartare was a little bland and then I was like I want to ask for salt, but am I going to insult them?
Is the chef going to come out of the kitchen and start flipping tables?
And I got halfway through the tartar, and I was like, it just needs some salt.
And I asked the server, they're like, yes, of course, of course.
And they brought over some flaky salt, and I didn't offend anyone.
But Don just, you know, don't be shy with the salt.
And maybe some capers, a little tiny bit of maybe some mustard in there.
There's a lot you can do with steak tartare.
Anyway, we'll hear more of your resolutions later on.
I'll reveal mine, as I said.
But now we're going to reshare one of our favorite episodes from the year.
We have a couple of criteria, Team Sporkful and I, when we pick this episode.
First, we pick one from earlier in the year, not one we just played.
And then also it's an episode that we really loved but that maybe didn't get the attention or the reaction that we wanted expected.
Sometimes, a great episode slips through the cracks just a little bit, and we don't want that to happen.
And so this year we're replaying an episode with one of my very favorite people.
I love him because he's so passionate, he's so obsessed with his subject matter, and when you're around him and talking about his area of expertise, you cannot help but be sucked in by that enthusiasm and passion and to feel it yourself.
What is that area of passion and expertise?
Which means, of course, I'm spending this episode hanging out with Scott Wiener of Scott's Pizza Tours.
This was so much fun to make this episode.
I think it's so much fun to listen.
Enjoy.
So, Scott, set the scene.
Where are we and what's happening today?
So we're at the corner of Fulton and Gold Street in Lower Manhattan, which is where I start every Sunday pizza bus tour.
And what is the Sunday pizza bus tour?
Sunday pizza bus tour is electric.
This is unlike the other tours we do throughout the week.
That are walking tours where you go to one neighborhood and we go to a bunch of places in that neighborhood.
The Sunday tour...
We go around all over the place, wherever the school bus will take us.
So it's the most improvisational tour.
And it's like the one that's definitely the most interesting because the most can go wrong.
What's the thing that went the most wrong on one of these tours?
You know, fortunately it hasn't gotten that bad because it's always salvageable.
But there have been times where I'm like, oh, I forgot that today is the Five Borough Bike Tour.
Oh, there was one time there was a car show on Arthur Avenue.
And I was like, okay, we're going to park the bus a block away.
Everybody will find us.
Everybody didn't find us, Dan.
I left two people in the Bronx.
That was, okay, scratch what I said about nothing ever going wrong.
This week, we're going on a food field trip with pizza obsessive Scott Wiener.
He's the guy behind Scott's Pizza Tours, a company that offers tours of New York City's most notable pizzerias.
Now, Scott started this business on his own back in 2008.
The company has grown a lot since then.
All right, excited.
We're going to meet Scott from Scott's Pizza Tour.
And look at the ride Gallman sprung for.
In 2018, Scott gave a tour to Ryan Seacrest for an episode of Live with Kelly and Ryan.
Why do you like Lombardi's?
So, coal-fired oven, fast-bake, crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, perfect balance.
Everything I want to hear.
Scott's been running his company for 17 years now.
It's become so popular he's had to hire a whole team of people to help him lead all the different tours.
They take eaters through all five boroughs of New York City to try a range of pizza styles.
Neapolitan, Sicilian, deep dish, wood-fired, coal-fired.
Over the years, Scott's made a name for himself as one of the most passionate and knowledgeable pizza experts in America.
And he never stops doing research, although he limits himself to 15 slices per week.
Now, if all this sounds familiar, that's because we had Scott on the show back in 2018.
In that episode, we heard he's not just obsessed with pizza.
He's fanatical about anything relating to pizza, which is why he has the Guinness record for the world's largest collection of pizza boxes.
He's now got nearly 2000 of them from all over the world, so many that he's had to move them into a storage unit.
But back when I first interviewed Scott, he was keeping all those boxes in his apartment.
Here's a bit of that conversation.
Okay, so now we're in my office, which has two stacks of pizza boxes that have been photographed but not logged into my spreadsheet.
So I catalog all the boxes.
It's a big spreadsheet.
Clearly, as I learned the first time I interviewed Scott, when you turn your passion into your day job, there's no such thing as leaving work at the office, which made me wonder.
How has this career path influenced your dating life?
Yeah.
Oh, what a funny question.
It's interesting because...
I try to stay away from talking about my job.
If I first meet somebody, I try to stay away from even talking about it.
Yeah, you're trying to play it cool.
Yeah, and I'm worried about, it's so easy for this to take over a whole conversation.
But I also know that it's very much truly me.
So it's okay if I'm getting to know somebody, they will need to know this at some point.
Right.
But maybe not the first five minutes of like, hey, how you doing?
Hey, I got to tell you about this pizza I saw yesterday.
Listen to this.
I would save the discussion of the spreadsheet for the second date.
I mean, if that comes up and she's into it, then hey, I'll buy a ring.
Has anyone you've been dating ever said something along the lines of I think you love pizza more than me?
Oh, everyone.
Everyone.
Oh, no.
And, you know, maybe it was acted as if it was in jest, but I know the truth.
Look, I love pizza, but I really don't think I'm insane.
We'll return to the topic of Scott's love life later.
But now, let's get to that field trip.
This past January, I met back up with Scott for one of his famous Sunday bus tours.
His company offers a lot of different kinds of tours, but this one is special for a couple reasons.
It's the only one Scott consistently leads.
And while the others are walking tours that stay in one neighborhood, this is the only one with a bus, which allows Scott to cover more ground.
He promises to take you to four pizzerias with diverse styles in at least two different boroughs of New York City.
Scott starts every Sunday tour at Keste Pizza & Vino in Lower Manhattan.
But the other three stops change every time.
Scott improvises the itinerary based on his read of the crowd.
There's about 30 of us on the tour today, including my wife Janie and our kids Becky and Emily.
It's a mix of local New Yorkers and tourists from across the U.S., South America, and Europe.
As the group assembles, Scott chats everyone up to learn about their previous pizza-eating and pizza-making experiences.
It helps him plan his route.
Sometimes he doesn't know where he's going until 15 minutes before.
But he's so tapped into the New York pizza scene that he can secure a reservation on a moment's notice.
And if one of the places he wants to go doesn't pan out, I'll reroute.
There's 3,000 pizzerias in the city.
Once everyone's seated inside Keste, Scott gives us the rundown.
He explains that the point of this tour is not just to taste a bunch of pizza.
He wants us to really pay attention to what we're eating and evaluate it scientifically.
That's why he gives everyone a pocket pizza journal and mini pencil to take notes.
We do cheese pizza at every stop.
Cheese, sauce, crust.
We don't add anything else because that will skew the scientific method.
I want the variable to be the pizzeria itself.
So that's why, when we're at the pizzeria, as you're eating, you should be jotting down your personal tasting notes.
Come on in, come on in.
Midway through Scott's spiel, two more people walk into the restaurant and join our group.
We're talking about cheese to sauce ratio.
We're talking about structural integrity of crust.
I still, I'm, you got to hide those boxes from me.
I can't concentrate on anything else right now.
They brought boxes.
You guys are in Sao Paulo?
Oh my God.
The two latecomers brought gifts new additions to Scott's pizza box collection from a pizzeria in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Scott is like a puppy who just heard the word treat.
Oh, my God.
Yes.
Can I really have this?
I will.
I will.
Scott is very excited.
I can't breathe.
I wasn't kidding.
Scott forces himself to settle down and get back on track.
He tells us about the restaurant we're at, Keste.
It's a Neapolitan pizzeria and stop number one on the tour.
He tells everyone to get up and follow him into the kitchen to get a good look at the oven.
And the way that it's designed is to trap as much heat as possible.
So that's why this style of pizza, Neapolitan pizza, is always baked at high temperatures for a very short amount of time.
In fact, right now...
We're at 750 Fahrenheit, which is 400 Celsius.
Scott just pulled an instant read thermometer out of his pocket.
That's the temperature of this oven right now, and it's the beginning of the day.
Like an infrared thermometer.
And in fact, that's just the temperature of the floor of the oven.
I love that nobody on this tour thought it was strange that Scott had an infrared thermometer in his pocket.
So reason for that is because pizza first evolved like way back in the day before we had pizza in New York.
It came out of Southern Italy in and around Naples.
And the reason that pizza developed the way it did is because pizza wasn't originally made as a food.
It was made as a tool.
As Scott explains, the first people to make pizza in southern Italy were bread bakers in the mid-1700s.
Back then, they weren't trying to make pizza.
They were just trying to cool down their ovens.
So you see how this oven's really hot, right?
If you were a bread baker, you would build a fire in the inside of the oven and the fire would heat up the oven, and that's when bread bakers would start baking breads.
But the problem is the oven floors were so hot, that they would burn the first bunch of breads.
Just so we're clear, these ovens have no racks.
So the floor of the oven is not only the bottom, it's also the surface you put the dough on.
But for these bakers back in the day, when the fire first really got going, the floor was too hot.
So bakers would toss circles of dough onto their oven floors purely for the purpose of absorbing heat.
Problem was plain dough would puff up into a balloon when baking, so hardly any of it was touching the oven floor, which meant it wasn't serving its purpose of absorbing heat and cooling the oven.
The solution?
Put something on the dough to weigh it down, to keep it flat.
Toppings.
According to Scott, when bakers first put toppings on flat dough, pizza was born.
Pizza, in my definition, is a leavened dough that gets stretched, topped, then baked.
So when people try to argue that, oh, so, oh, deep dish pizza's not a pizza.
I say, no, of course it is.
Dough that you top.
And then bake pizza.
But it took time for those early toppings to change, for pizza to evolve into the food we know today.
If you think with the mind of a mid-18th century bread baker in southern Italy, you're using whatever is available, whatever's cheap and whatever's edible, which would have at that time been lard fish paste.
Scott says tomatoes didn't enter the equation until the early 1800s.
Any fresh produce would have been too expensive and hard to come by to be used just for pizza.
Because, you know, at that time, pizza was a food eaten only by poor Italians.
Pizza was not a celebrated food.
It was a part of the culture.
It was a part of the street culture.
And the people who ate it are what they called the Lazzaroni, the beggars, the street folks.
In the late 18 and early 1900s there was an influx of poorer southern Italian immigrants to America.
And over time, pizza became hugely popular here.
Only then, starting around 1950, did pizza become more commonly eaten across Italy.
So this in my hand here is a Neapolitan pizza.
Scott pulls a freshly baked Neapolitan-style pizza out of the oven that we're all standing around.
It's also so soft and puffy on the edge that when you poke it with your finger it pops right back up.
This is where this style of pizza is really, really good.
He leads our group out of the kitchen and back to our tables to try our first slice of the day.
When the pizza lands at your table, you're going to put your plate right next to the slice you want, and then you're going to do the snag and drag.
Snag the slice, pull it horizontally onto your plate.
All right, first pizza, first slice, keste.
The crust is really good.
This is my daughter, Emily.
To me what makes this crust so good?
You notice how it's like crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside.
And it's that combination of being crispy and chewy together is special and that's very hard to find in pizza crusts.
The sauce is also excellent.
The only ingredients in it are fresh raw tomato and salt.
After finishing our slices, I go over to the couple that brought Scott the pizza boxes all the way from Sao Paulo.
It turns out they own seven pizzerias across southeastern Brazil.
Last year they competed in the World Pizza Championship and came in second for the best Roman-style pizza in the country.
And for them, coming on one of Scott's tours is a sort of pilgrimage.
I was curious to get their thoughts on the pizza at Keste.
Amazing.
Very amazing.
The fermentation is perfect.
I think it's very good.
The smells of the dough is very amazing.
I didn't smell the dough.
Next pizzeria, I'm going to smell the dough.
After everyone's finished their slices, it's time to head to stop number two.
When we leave the first stop, people always say, oh, I'm so hungry, I need more.
And I'm like, just wait, trust me about this.
Scott leads our group out of the restaurant and onto the street where we find the defining feature of the Sunday tour.
Oh, look, it says pizza bus on it.
It's a big yellow school bus.
Okay, pizza buddies, welcome to the school bus.
We climb in and head towards the second stop.
But only Scott and the driver know where we're going.
Remember, the Sunday pizza bus tour is improvised.
So we just crossed under the Brooklyn Bridge, and then we're going to go under the Manhattan Bridge.
We're going to be cruising up the east side of Manhattan.
On our way, Scott asks if anyone has any questions about what we've seen so far.
Someone in the back raises their hand.
So Karen's question is about why is pizza better in New York than it is in other cities?
My first response is it's not.
It doesn't have to be better.
Pizza can be equally as good in every other place on the planet.
Like Lindsay was just joking about.
People say, oh, it's because of the water.
It is 100% not about the water.
Our water doesn't have anything extra that nobody else has.
What it has is less.
Pretty low in chlorine, especially in the winter.
And that just means you can match our water pretty easily by filtering and doing pretty simple filtration systems that anybody can get.
What it is about a place like New York is culture.
It's not that the pizza can't be better in other places.
Is that there's no reason for it to match the style that we have here?
Because slice joints are such a huge part of New York culture.
There are pizzerias everywhere, which means a lot of competition and a discerning customer base, which creates pressure to make better pizza.
You know, it's the same reason why barbecue is, on average, still better in the parts of the country known for barbecue, even though you can smoke meat anywhere.
Anyway, after about 20 minutes, we arrive at our destination.
Okay, so we're up First Avenue between 117th and 118th Street.
I'm taking you to the original Patsy's in East Harlem, which has a coal-fired oven.
So this way we can learn more about the difference between this and other oven types and all those other details.
All right?
Ready to rumble?
Let's go.
You hungry?
The pizza at the original Patsy's is coal-fired.
It's made in the same oven they used when the restaurant first opened in 1933.
Patsy's was one of New York's first pizzerias, alongside Lombardi's, Totono's, and John's.
Today there are a handful of spinoff locations under other ownership, but only this one and the one in Brooklyn still use a coal-fired oven.
So before we eat, Scott takes us into the kitchen to see the oven in action.
Watch your step here.
Pizza's coming through.
When Scott spots two pizzas that are about to go in, he pulls out his phone to time how long they take to bake.
Now these are going in.
Two regular pies.
We all crowd around the oven, which Scott's infrared thermometer tells us is about 750 degrees.
The coal inside burns day-glow orange.
Boom.
Three minutes, 20 seconds.
And it looks perfect.
So...
With two pies freshly out of the oven, it's time to eat.
Scott still has his thermometer in his hand.
Scott, how often do you break out the infrared thermometer at home?
Infrared thermometer is an important part of every day.
Every day.
I wake up, I shoot it out the window toward the sun.
I want to know what the weather's going to be like.
This time, Scott measures the temperature of the cheese on top of the pizza as it comes out of the oven and lands on our tables.
You know, because he doesn't want any burned mouths.
We're only at stop number two.
And a burned mouth at Patsy's specifically is a real concern because of the type of cheese they use.
It's called low moisture mozzarella.
It's more fat.
So this comes out hotter.
All right.
Our pizza's coming.
This looks beautiful.
Let it cool.
Scott, what's the temperature of the surface of our pizza right now?
So this is where, this one's going to be hotter.
187, so... Don't eat it yet.
The cheese pizza at Patsy's is extra thin and crispy, with shredded mozzarella on top and a more savory sauce than what we had at Keste.
Picture an upscale version of a classic New York slice.
What temper are we at now?
Let's check the temper of the cheese again.
So it's been a couple minutes, so my bet is that it's around 176.
Oh, down lower, 165.
So we're safe?
Golden territory, guys.
All right, chow down.
This crust is pretty good.
This is my wife, Janie, and our other daughter, Becky.
This is very good, but the crust, like at the top of the slice, looks less like soft than the other one.
It's more crispy.
I mean, I do love the thinness of this crust.
I think the flavor is great.
But I think that difference of the uncooked tomato sauce that they use at Kesta, that they put tomatoes on the only cooking is
In the oven.
It gives it more of a fresh tomato taste, which I kind of prefer, versus the sort of stewed tomato taste.
Yeah.
What are your thoughts?
For the first one, I rated it an 8.7.
And would you rate this one?
8.
No.
8.57.
Oh, so this is better, you're rating it.
No.
The other one is going to be 8.85.
This is going to be 8.57.
Wow, it just got promoted.
No, 8.58.
Actually, 8.5789.
No, 8.5897.
Oh.
Coming up, the tour continues and we try two more styles of pizza in two other boroughs of New York.
I feel like, because there's been time in between each slice, each slice that I eat Scott, I just get more hungry.
That's the goal.
You should not feel full until after the fourth one.
But when you get to the fourth, you should look at it and be like I know my body's done, but my heart is not.
Then later, has Scott found someone who can capture a bigger slice of his heart than pizza?
And I reveal my New Year's food resolution for 2026.
Stick around.
And now, a delicious word from our sponsors.
It's very good.
Welcome back to The Sporkful.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Last week on the show, we did our second annual salad spinner year in review.
We covered some of the biggest and strangest food stories of the past year, including how Guy Fieri lost a truckload of tequila, the rise of international fast food chains and the move towards dynamic pricing at restaurants, which means they might start charging you more for reservations at a certain time or at a certain table, or charging more for the same menu items at different times of day.
One of our guests in that episode, Helen Rosner, has some opinions on that.
This already kind of exists.
Lots of restaurants charge different prices for lunch than they do for dinner.
True.
The second thought that I have about this is that is morally reprehensible, and I hope that you get eaten by a lion.
Like, that sucks and it's shitty and it's bad for everybody.
Now our other guest in this episode was Yasmin Tayay, who tells us about her visit to the Jollibee Commissary in the Philippines, where they make 100000 peach mango pies per day.
This episode's a ton of fun and you'll get a nice review of the big and small news of the year that you wanted some more context on or might have missed entirely.
Now, what's up now?
Check it out.
One more quick note as we head into 2026.
We have two live Sporkful tapings on the calendar March 19th in Brooklyn with Kenji Lopez-Alt, and May 1st in Boston, guest TBD.
Link for tickets and info at sporkful.com slash events.
All right, let's get back into our New Year's show.
Before we return to the pizza tour, though, let's hear a few more of your resolutions for 2026.
Hi, my name is Laura.
I'm calling from North Dakota.
My 2026 food New Year's resolution is to bake my way through the cookbook Happiness is Baking by Maida Heater.
She released it when she was 102 years old.
I got this book a couple of years ago.
I love a lot of the recipes in it.
And so I think it'll be a fun challenge for myself to make everything in it.
Hi, Dan.
This is Addie from Philadelphia.
And in the new year, I resolve to eat more pancakes.
My husband and I both have great memories of growing up, having pancakes on the weekends, and we just had a baby.
So I want to spend the year perfecting my pancake griddle temperature and timing so that I can create lovely, cozy memories of pancakes on the weekends for my daughter, like I had growing up.
This is Taylor from Humphrey, Nebraska, and in 2026, I'm going to eat more ground beef.
A local farmer gave me a quarter of beef, which is a lot of ground beef, and I'm going to have meatballs and meatloaf and burgers and ground beef skillets of all kinds.
Hooray for more beef.
Vitamin beef.
Man, those are some good ones.
Laura in North Dakota made a heater, an absolute icon.
My mom gifted me a couple of her books.
And Taylor, the beef guy, that sounds like a great resolution.
You should add patty melts to your list and get creative with condiments and maybe like dipping sauces for the patty melt.
Also, you know I'm biased here, but try the mapo tofu cascatelli recipe and anything's possible, because that one knocks my socks off every time.
All right, stay tuned to the end for my New Year's food resolution, but for now let's get back to Scott's pizza tour.
After a lot of careful consideration from Emily... You know what?
Yeah, 8.6.
We leave Patsy's, back on the bus, and head to the third stop on the tour.
So we're still in Manhattan, in East Harlem, and we will be departing this borough now.
We're going to be going into Queens...
Along the way, Scott tells us about the history of New York City pizzeria naming conventions.
Most pizzerias at the time.
In the early 1900s, most pizzerias in New York were just called Pizzeria Napolitana.
It's like saying ice cream shop.
It's just telling you what it is.
Later, they started calling them by the names of the proprietors.
So to differentiate between one and another, you would say Patsy's or Lombardi's or whatever.
And that's why those pizzerias, they were not called Patsy's, Lombardi's, and John's on day one.
It wasn't until like into the 30s and 40s.
That's when we started to get name differences in pizzerias.
About 20 minutes later we pull up to stop number three, a newer place called Beebe's in Long Island City, Queens.
It's located on the first floor of a hipster chic hotel.
Now, at our first two stops, we ate pizza with roots in the early 1900s.
Scott brought us here to try American artisan-style pizza, emblematic of what's in style this century.
All right, pizza number three, I'm going in.
I could hear the crunch in that bite.
This was my favorite sauce.
I want this sauce and cheese on Keste's crust.
Really?
This is so thin.
I know.
And so crispy.
I don't know.
They're all pretty amazing.
Now I have to try to give it a rating.
Okay.
More than a... 8.589.
And where does that put it?
That puts it in the second place?
This is the thinnest one we've had so far.
It's kind of brittle, yeah.
Not brittle enough for Emily to leave on her plate though.
Do you need help finishing your crust?
While people finish eating, I check in with Scott about the final stop.
He admits to me that, while stops two and three weren't totally confirmed until today, he did have some idea of where he wanted to go for those.
But now things are getting interesting.
For the next stop, I have nothing pre-planned.
I have nothing even on hold.
That one's going to be a complete audible.
A few minutes later, someone on the tour asks Scott a question that gets him very excited.
So your question is what are my thoughts on pan-baked pizzas?
This is an incredible question.
Every pizza we've had so far today baked directly on the floor of the oven.
Now our next stop has to be not baked on the floor.
We need to see a difference.
Since the first three slices we had were baked on the floor, Scott wants stop number four to feature a pizza baked in a pan.
Did you just make a decision in your mind about the fourth stop?
Not one decision, but now I've narrowed it down to two places that I'm thinking about going.
So now I'm pulling out my map.
I got my Google map.
Well, there's a place right there that's really good.
And there's a place right there that I really like.
I'm actually eliminating one place that I was thinking about going.
Oh, but now as I zoom in, I realize there's another place that now I'm thinking about going.
Oh, all right.
After BB's, we get back on the bus, and we're moving.
And set a course for the last pizzeria of the day.
All right, here we are.
Stop number four.
Let's do it.
Stop number four, indeed.
For our final slice, Scott's brought us to Brooklyn to try Il Porto Ristorante in Clinton Hill.
We follow him inside and find a section of tables reserved for our group.
Il Porto's best known for their grandma-style pizza, which is baked in a pan.
Sicilian pizza is also baked in a pan, but Scott explains the difference.
The grandma pizza is characterized by its shape and its thickness.
So grandma is always a rectangular pizza, which includes squares.
It can be square, it's fine.
Now, any style of pizza can have the sauce on top of the cheese, like you see it here.
But I think sometimes people assume a square pizza with sauce on top of the cheese means it's a grandma.
And I see people ask me about famous pizzerias like LB's Pomona Gardens, which is sauce on top of cheese, but it is very much a Sicilian pizza at that place.
Grandma pizza is thin and crunchier.
A Sicilian is thicker and puffier.
I want to let you guys dive into this.
As Scott talks, four grandma slices are dropped off at our table.
This is outstanding.
This is my favorite one.
Emily, you're in charge of crunch sound effects today.
What was your favorite pizza?
Probably Keste, I'd say.
My sort of quick reviews are Keste.
I love that the crust was crispy and chewy at the same time.
Patsy's was very thin.
It was more salty.
It was more oily.
It was a thinner, crispier crust.
And then the third one, also very good, but that crust was a little bit too thin for my taste and it was very good, but it was almost like a cracker.
And I want a little bit of chewiness.
Keste had the chewiness.
Upon further reflection, I want to revise my ratings.
I want to put the Grandma at Il Porto tied with Keste in the top slot.
That crackly crust from the pan was so nice, and the sauce was insane.
It's very different from the others, so it's a little hard for me to really put them head-to-head.
But biting into her grandma's slice, Emily didn't have any issue.
This is the best one.
This is like a 9.8.
Wow, that's crushing.
I think I gave it a 10.
Whoa, 10?
Any better?
This is great.
All right, thanks everyone.
We're ready to roll.
After Il Porto, the bus takes us back to Keste, where we started the tour.
We're going to cruise over the Manhattan Bridge, so check it out.
If you look out of the port side to the left, you'll be seeing the Brooklyn Bridge and the sunshine.
Thank you guys for coming out.
Have a slice day.
I'll see you in the future.
For me, there are two foods in the world that, when I have a really good version of it, the more of it I eat, the hungrier I seem to get.
One of those foods is steak and the other is pizza.
And apparently I'm not alone in that feeling, because after the tour ends, my family and I get a table at Keste and order three more pizzas for the table.
Scott joins me too, which is good because I have a few more questions for him.
As you heard at the beginning, Scott's first love was and always will be pizza.
But in the last few years, it's been bumped down in the hierarchy of his loves.
Do you want to tell me your name?
Shelby.
This is Scott's daughter, Shelby.
She's almost two.
We met online.
And this is his wife, Elena.
They met in 2018, not long after our first episode with Scott aired.
I don't know.
We both were drawn to each other because we each had some food element in our profiles.
Oh, okay.
Scott was making homemade pizza, and I had a picture in Hawaii of eating some poke.
So we were drawn to each other.
What did your profile say, Scott?
Mine didn't say anything about pizza.
I think there was a picture when you can not even tell I was in a pizzeria, but it said something about wanting to make fresh pasta.
Like wanting to learn how to make fresh pasta.
And I think that's I remember you were interested in that and saying oh, that's interesting that you want to learn fresh pasta.
Scott didn't hit Elena with the full intensity of his pizza obsession right away.
But when they started messaging back and forth, they did bond over a shared passion for food.
Oh, yeah, of course.
It wouldn't have gotten any further if that wasn't the case.
I mean, food's extremely important to me.
Both of us, yeah.
So after some messages were exchanged, they had their first date.
But Scott continued to play it cool on the pizza front.
So when the obligatory what do you do for work question came up.
I'm sure I didn't say, oh, I run a pizza tour company in the city.
I would have been vague about like, oh, I work in food education or something like that.
Even the word pizza, I probably would have left out.
For their second date, they went out to a Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn.
Well then, after we ate there, we walked down the street because he wanted to show me Polly G's pizzeria.
Because you had mentioned being interested in the interior design.
And we ran into the owners and it became a whole.
And then I found out that he had been on with Ryan Seacrest like the day before doing a tour with him.
So it just, you know...
So you expressed interest in the interior design of a pizzeria.
Scott took you by.
You ran into the owners.
Of course, the owners of any noteworthy pizzeria in New York know Scott.
Yeah.
And so they are like, hey, Scott.
And you're like, how is he best friends with the owner?
And then the next thing out of his mouth is like, hey, I saw you with Ryan Seacrest yesterday.
And you're like, what?
Yeah.
Yep.
Pretty much how it unfolded.
Yeah.
Scott's cover was blown.
But as the magnitude of his obsession became clear to Elena, she wasn't scared off.
In fact, it turns out their jobs have some things in common.
Elena's an architect and she's done a lot of work with the Department of Buildings and all the stuff with the city.
And I think when we first met...
You know, as I was trying to connect with you more about architecture, I would bring out like well, and I collect blueprints from old bakery ovens.
And, you know, I go to Municipal Archive and dig this stuff up.
And there was that weird connection of like, oh wait, you use these resources for a completely different reason.
But there's a lot of crossover.
Still, it took a while before Elena found out about Scott's spreadsheet, the one that catalogs his pizza box collection.
I don't think it was until I had already moved in.
Really?
I helped you fill out the spreadsheet.
Yeah.
I mean, I love spreadsheets, so it would have been fine.
That might have been a turn-on.
Yeah.
You know what they say.
Find someone who looks at you the way you look at spreadsheets.
My thanks to Scott Wiener of Scott's Pizza Tours.
I got to say.
Whether you are a New Yorker looking for a fun activity or visiting from out of town, Scott's Tours are so fun and incredibly delicious.
They're really like one of the few activities that I think are phenomenal for locals and tourists alike.
See all the options and sign up at scottspizzatourscom.
And now it's the moment that i hope you've been waiting for.
You're still here, you're still listening, so i guess you've been waiting for it.
First, i have to grade myself on my 2025 resolution, and it may be some indication to you of what the grade's going to be when i tell you that i had to look up what the resolution was.
I didn't even remember what it was.
It was basically like to eat more sandwiches, but special sandwiches, like to put more effort into my sandwiches.
I guess I did it a little bit, but there was obviously not a whole lot of intentionality behind it, since I couldn't remember that was my resolution.
I'm trying to think of like one.
I mean, I did some good cooking.
I did some good eating this year.
It was a good year on the eating front, but like, did I make a sandwich?
I mean there's a place called Eduardo's Trattoria in Huntington, New York, near where I live, and they have a lunch.
It's a really good classic Italian place.
Not so much Italian-American, really Italian.
And they have a lunch sandwich that's like mortadella.
Is it stracciatella or mozzarella?
And pistachios on like a brioche.
And that thing is phenomenal.
But I didn't make that.
So I'm going to give myself the worst grade I've ever given myself on a resolution, and that is a C-.
I mean, I should probably get a D-, but, you know, we're grading on a curve here.
So first off, I resolve to do better in 2026.
As for my resolution for the coming year, this is going to be a bit of a curveball.
I believe this is the first time ever that I am going to pick a drink instead of a food, because I recently had a major revelation.
For the past I don't know, was it 20 years or so we've seen the rise of all these cocktail menus at restaurants right.
And this, you know, the idea of mixology.
And look, if you're into it, great.
I'm not yucking your yum.
But I realized recently that and I will often order something from one of those menus and sometimes I like it, sometimes I really like it.
But like, most of the time, it's fine.
It's very rare that I really like it.
And I don't know that I've ever had a fancy cocktail from any one of these places that I like took one sip and was like, oh yes, that is the stuff.
That is exactly what I wanted in this moment.
It's never happened to me.
20 years of ordering cocktails off fancy cocktail menus.
About a month ago, I was out to eat with some friends.
It came time to order drinks.
I'm looking at the cocktail menu.
I'm looking.
Nothing's speaking to me.
I'm like, you know, I'm just tired of ordering these things.
They're never that great.
They're never exactly what I wanted.
I said, you know what?
Forget this menu.
Let me just get a Jack and Coke.
And you should know I have a long relationship with Jack and Coke.
It was my favorite cocktail for a long time.
And then I got taken with these fancy cocktail menus.
So you may be guessing where this is going.
In 2026, I resolved to drink more.
It's my homemade drum roll sound effect.
Jack and Coke.
Jack and Coke, for me, is the greatest cocktail ever devised.
It's sweet.
It's sparkly.
It packs a punch.
It's got a little bit of sugar and caffeine to put some pep in your step.
It's got everything.
And I just, If Jack and Coke isn't your thing, I would just want to encourage you to just get back to basics on the cocktail front.
You don't need a cocktail with six different ingredients, four of which you have to like Google to know what they are.
And like a sprig of rosemary.
I love rosemary, but I don't need it in my drink.
So have a gin and tonic, have a seven and seven, have a Jack and ginger, or take a cue from me and have a Jack and Coke.
But in 2026 on the drinking front, I'm getting back to basics.
Next week, it's our final episode of the year.
I talk with the one and only Stanley Tucci about his classic film Big Night and how having tongue cancer changed the way he approaches eating.
That's next week.
While you wait for that one, check out last week's salad spinner year in review.
It's up now.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go fix myself a drink.
As we wind down the year, I hope you have had, and will continue to have, a wonderful holiday season, filled with family and or friends and a lot of deliciousness.
Happy New Year.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app.
It has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage.
Does your podcasting app have that?
And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXMcom slash Sporkful.
This episode was produced by me, along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara and producer Grace Rubin.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Kristen from Jamaica, Queens, reminding you to eat more, eat better and eat more better.
Thank you.
