Restaurant Review: Wylie Dufresne’s Pizzeria has a really good salad

It’s the age of the pizza nerd.

If you recently queued for a pizza, or used Resy Notify to get a table where you later ate a pizza, or showed up at a certain place and time because you learned on Instagram that it’s the site of a pizza drop , chances are a pizza nerd made the pizza in question.

As pizza geeks talk, no step in the process of mixing and rising and baking pizza is too technical, no detail too detailed. They talk to each other about the hydration of their dough, the effect of long fermentation times, the digestibility of the crust.

Which should mean the time is right for a Wylie Dufresne pizzeria, like Stretch pizza, which he recently opened on Park Avenue South. No other chef did as much as Mr. Dufresne to make kitchen geek cool. His WD-50 restaurant was the city’s premier laboratory for pure and applied food science. He figured out how to use gelatin, gellan gum and an immersion blender fry mayonnaise; how to bind ground shellfish with transglutaminase to make shrimp noodles; and how to harness the reaction of xanthan gum and konjack flour to make a foie gras terrine that can be stretched and tied into a knot.

To the extent that it ever caught on, the practice of following scientific principles to achieve kitchen breakthroughs had largely disappeared from the restaurant kitchen by the time Mr. Dufresne closed WD-50, in 2014, and its more casual restaurant, Alder, in 2015. However, that approach is alive and well in baking circles — especially, and somewhat unlikely, among the younger generation of pizza makers.

Even the mozzarella-paved road that led Mr. Dufresne to the pizza parlor – reading technique during the shelter phase during the pandemic, practicing at home, post pictures of his cakeis on Instagramand optionally selling to takeaway customers in a pop-up — is the same route taken by many of the newly minted pizza nerds.

So why isn’t more of the bug-eyed nerd energy so abundant in the pizza scene these days, in Stretch Pizza?

The pizzeria, of which Mr. Dufresne in partnership with Gadi Peleg, the owner of Breads Bakery and a card-carrying dough nerd herself, pays homage to the pizza Mr. Dufresne ate while growing up in Manhattan in the ’70s and ’80s. This wasn’t the coal oven pizza people lined up to get John’s and Arturo’s, but the portable, folding slices sold on paper plates by Famous Ray’s Original in the Village and available in reasonable facsimile in every part of town . There’s no margherita or marinara on the menu at Stretch, which starts with a “Classic NY” pie — what a New Yorker would call a cheese, or plain or plain pizza.

Mr. Dufresne has greatly improved the crust and brought it into modern times. It’s much lighter and crispier and fresher in flavor than it was common in the ’80s, when the pizza base had no discernible flavor other than the occasional sweetness from added sugar, and pizzerias never talked about their dough, much less about it. its digestibility.

The era of tight pants and unbuttoned shirts is also the touchstone for Scarr’s Pizza and Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop, among others. But their pizzas exude more streetwise charm than Stretch’s – and more orange fat, for that matter. The 12-inch pies at Stretch are fine, almost chaste.

Fat may not be everyone’s favorite pizza topping, but Stretch can be improved by using a little more of it. Most wood-fired pizzerias these days shower their pizza with extra virgin olive oil before putting it in the oven; oil is an important part of the crackling on the crust of a Sicilian or granny pizza. So is shredded cheese, which is responsible for the Detroit-style “frico crust” that has spread far beyond Detroit in recent years. All of this has worked on New Yorkers’ taste buds, and now relatively low-fat pizzas like the one at Stretch can strike us as tasteless.

Mr. Dufresne may see all that added oil and cheese as cheating, but Stretch may well bend the rules. In a sense, yes. The pizzas arrive with three dipping sauces: green goddess, tomato and halal cart white sauce. But does a great pizza need sauce on the side?

Stretch makes two standard pies, plain and pepperoni. All others are original. The most fun to eat is the Couch Potato, an adaptation of a loaded baked potato. Perhaps the most original is the Nellie, a heart-on-the-sleeve love song for shallots, which appear roasted, pickled, and baked into golden wisps that cling above the surface in a lacy cloud.

There’s very little of the boundary-pushing Mr. Dufresne is known for, though the puddles of horseradish cream between slices of ham on the Ploughman won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and topping a zucchini and smoked eggplant pizza (the Oddfather) with “Tempura crumbs are functionally no different than pouring a box of Rice Krispies over them.

Appetizers suggest that Mr. Dufresne could run a smart, playful and truly inventive Italian restaurant in the ways of Don Angie and his imitators. Chunks of chickpea fritters contain more fresh basil than you’d think possible, and shrimp and scampi toast seems to taste like Little Italy one minute and Chinatown the next. A tender meatball on a fluffy white bun essentially turns out to be a meatball parmesan hero almost ready to ascend to heaven.

But nothing is as good or mind-blowing as the potato chip salad.

It sounds like a classic stoner idea, and as far as I know it is one, but it takes an unusually clever stoner to come up with a green salad with salt and vinegar chips that work as both crouton and vinaigrette.

This dish already has cult status. There was a slight panic among the believers last month Grub Street reported that Rick Bishop, the Sullivan County farmer who makes the chips, had retired.

A pizzeria is in trouble when its hottest item, and probably the tastiest, is a salad. These problems can be eased by one of the beautifully textured cocktails, such as the vodka martini with tomato brandy and olive leaf liqueur, the Crossing Delancey. It can be soothed with banana soft serve ice cream encased in a shell of peanut butter and sprinkled with bouncy cubes of chocolate babka. But it cannot be erased completely.