I don’t know what happened to Café Antonio the 1st. If, by chance, it has transitioned to the big pizza oven in the sky, I hope it’s looking down on Tony Jr. with the damp smize of a dad realizing his boy is going to be alright without him. Grandma, too, should rest easy, knowing her little nipotino has become a man and is doing justice to her time-honored recipes, because Antonio II’s iteration of grandma’s pizza is purely masterful.
I’ll add here my obligatory caveat that I am not a professional food critic, so what follows will not contain an analysis of mouthfeel or the like. But, you didn’t come here for that did you? Look at you; you just want a delicious pizza pie. I’m proud of you for making it to paragraph two. So, in case you don’t make it to paragraph three, you should know that when you open that box, you will be greeted by a beautiful glistening cheese canvas, ribboned by tomato sauce with the artful haphazard of Jackson Pollock. That corner bite is going to give you a surprisingly crispy crunch, which made me wonder if a savory butter cookie is a real thing. The cheese and pizza oil will coat your mouth with a baseline umami which both sustains the flavor there and acts as a binder to the flavors to come. Immediately after, you’re hit with a sharp, sweet tang of that sauce – sweeter than I’m used to but in perfect balance with the cheesy goodness and Italian herbs besprinkled atop. It’s thin but not super crisp and is dangerously munchable. It will make you want to find the grandma responsible for this and kiss her sweetly, but also slightly inappropriately, just so she feels a modicum of the lust you feel for her pizza.
Joking aside, there is a legitimate cause for concern regarding the consumption of this pizza, which may eventually lead to FDA intervention. Despite its composition of heavy ingredients such as bread and cheese, the slim profile and flavor dynamics make it dangerously gorge-able, as it leads to a condition called Short-Term Gastro Amnesia (STGA). The best example of this condition can be observed when eating popcorn, where no matter how much you consume, it never leads to a feeling of fullness. I use the popcorn example deliberately. Back in the late 1800s the inventor of modern popcorn faced charges of public menace due to this very condition. The state of Illinois asserted that popcorn could cause a serious health epidemic due to what was later termed STGA. The inventor was absolved on the technicality that popcorn is a health food as it is technically a whole grain and tangentially a vegetable. You can read about this case here: The State of Illinois vs. Charles Cretor.
For those of you who followed the link to the court case, I apologize for the tangent and welcome back. For those who didn’t, please trust that it was a very in-depth and insightful look at the Illinois state judiciary, the FDA and the technical particularities of STGA, which is totally a legitimate ailment.
Now back to this amazing pizza pie. Can I claim that it’s the best pizza you will ever eat? No, I cannot. There are too many pizza variations be able to make a definitive statement like that. What I can claim, is that it is the best pizza in Collingswood. I stand behind that and, because this is my personal blog, there’s no one to tell me any different. I actually had a side-by-side taste test at Raccoon Taproom with some friends who claimed that some other pizza was better. The results confirmed that Antonio’s is the best.
What I can claim is that you’re going to bite into a slice and your brain is going to tell your eyes to widen and look at the slice in a “goddamn, I didn’t know you were going to hit like that” fashion – like you’re expecting the slice to offer some sort of explanation for all that flavor or apologize for catching you off-guard in such a way. You’re going to wish the crust was a bit crispier and that those middle slices didn’t leave you completely covered in sauce and cheese oil, but as soon as you napkin-off, STGA kicks in and you realize you don’t have pizza in your hand anymore and did you have one slice or three already and it must have only been one because you’re still hungry and either way you have room for another slice and who needs leftovers anyway and omnomnomnomnom….
Verdict: 10 out of 10