Five Borough Challenge - Stop #4: Sac's Place in Queens

As we all learned from Prince Akeem, Queens is an incredible place to find a bride.  It also happens to be a borough brimming with fantastic pizza places.

With a surfeit of pizza parlors to peruse, we hit the books to do a little research on what place might be the perfect stop on our cheese and sauce fueled journey.  A name that kept coming up over and over as a favorite of locals and critics alike was Sac's Place, located in the neighborhood of Astoria.

Sac's is short for Sacramone, as in Anthony Sacramone, the proprietor.  Mr. Sacramone obviously takes a lot of pride in his product, going so far as to grow his own oregano, basil and rosemary at his home in Pennsylvania, making mozzarella in-house, and shopping for all the vegetables used in the store himself.  As any pie constructor worth his salt does, Anthony also exclusively uses San Marzano tomatoes to make his pizza sauce.

No relation to these Sacramones, though Ginny does love a good slice...

What results from the marriage of high quality ingredients, a coal burning oven and Mr. Sacramone's pizza know-how is an extraordinarily balanced pie that hits all of the right notes.  I'll let Mr. Josh Ozersky, a favorite food writer of mine, tell what he thought of his Sac's Place pie: 

 "The telltale random crust bubbles and tiny black spots on the bottom tell the tale of coal heat, but it isn't until you bite into the slice that you get the coal effect. This isn't the thin, matzo-like crust, so delicate and austere, served at Coney Island's Totonno's or the thick, cake-like confection of Manhattan's Arturo's (to mention two of its coal-oven cousins). It's just thick enough to support the toppings, to avoid tip sag and to give a pleasing contrast between the crisp crust and the moist, sweet dough in the middle."

I can't believe I have to wait until Sunday for this...

Top that crust off with sweet tomato sauce, creamy fresh mozzarella and Sacramone grown fresh herbs, and you have yourself a pie worth trekking to Queens for.  No matter how far away you're from...

They don't make pizza like this in Zamunda (or at McDowell's)