Occasionally we read something so wrong-headed — so perverse, self-righteous, and utterly dopey — that our fingers shake on our keyboard, and a vein throbs in our temple. That was the case some minutes ago when we read Gotham City Insider’s “F Di Fara” post. What effrontery! This character was apparently not pleased that, upon entering the city’s most sacred temple of pizza-making, the crowd didn’t part for him, and the Saint of Avenue J failed to greet him with a hearty hello. “You want $20 for a pie? Say hello to me when I walk in. Ask me what I need. I don’t care how fucking busy you are — that is NOT Brooklyn.” How can we begin to unpack the gall, the crust, the audacity of this? Some anonymous writer is going to lecture Dom De Marco on what constitutes Brooklyn culture? Why not just lecture Jefferson on civics? The blogger, a laid-off Bear Sterns employee no doubt seething with cosmic bitterness, exaggerates the dirtiness of the place (what’s a little loose trash in the name of greatness?) and then goes on to claim that only credulous foodies keep Di Fara’s in business: “Without this hipster/foodie cache you’d just be another dirty, random, roach infested pizza joint in Midwood.”
We never thought we would live long enough to hear something this ridiculous. Maybe if the writer had actually bothered to eat the pizza, he would feel differently. Far from being a random pizza joint, Di Fara’s attracts pilgrims from all over the Eastern seaboard by the sheer merit of its food. It is hot. It is untidy. Dom doesn’t talk to anybody. It is expensive. And yet in spite of all that, the common consensus of pizzakind is that Di Fara’s is a shrine and its proprietor a hero of culinary self-sacrifice. If anything, the hipsters and pseudo-foodies have done the place a disservice by making it worthwhile to jeer at a man whose whole life has been devoted to the task of making one single pizza at a time every day but Christmas for 40 years. As with any scurrilous claim, we dishonor both Dom and ourselves by even trying to refute this. But we owe it to Di Fara to do so.
F Di Fara [Gotham City Insider]
