[title type="h5"]Thursday, October 23, 2014.
Slidell Pizza Emigrant To Mandeville.[/title]
What with all the cutting-edge wood-burning-oven pizzerias, advances in standard New York-style pizza locally have gone unnoticed. One of the best such restaurants was hidden for years in a little storefront in Slidell. That edition of Neely's would not have struck you as a promising source of great pie, but it was. Using the old gas-fired Blodgett ovens that were the standard of the pizza biz until the dreaded conveyor-belt bakers took over, Neely's made nearly-perfect thin-crust pizzas. Among its specialties were pizzas as wide as 28 inches across. (Those caused a lot of trouble when people questioned why a 28-incher cost more than three times as much as a 14-inch--something obvious only to those with strong mathematics backgrounds.)
Neely's closed in Slidell a few months ago, but soon after reopened in a more accessible (if not really obvious) spot in Mandeville. It's the space formerly jammed with the customers of Pontchartrain Po-Boys, which moved about a year ago to the much bigger space it desperately deserved.
Jon Neely was on the Round Table show a few weeks ago to explain all this. Since then, its pizzas have been on my mind. They are an easy sell to the Marys tonight for dinner.
We order a big Italian salad to split. It used better greens and vegetables than we customarily get from places like this, but the dressing needs some work. Then two pizzas--one with the Marys' standard topping of way too much pepperoni. As popular as pepperoni is, every new bite of it strengthens my opinion that it's strictly for kids, and unavoidably greasy. But I respect the tastes of others when it comes to minimum requirements for grease. (See "Manuel's Hot Tamales" and "Any Good Chili Con Carne.")
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Garlic Snapper pizza at Neely's.[/caption]
Jon Neely tells me that his signature pizza is the Garlic Snapper." He explains that "snapper" is a slang word in his family for anyone who has an uncontrollable hunger for something. (See "Bacon" and "Chocolate.") In this case, the pizza is covered with an olive oil base, a lot of herbs, slices of tomato, a goodly amount of mozzarella, and a tremendous amount of garlic. I would qualify as a bacon snapper, as would everyone else in my family. (The four of us have been known to use an entire head of garlic to make four plates of pasta bordelaise. It's a source of harmony.)
The Bacon Snapper is very good. The crusts are just as I remember when Neely's was in Slidell. One not-to-good change is that the kitchen couldn't keep up with the orders. We were there a long time, and so was everyone else in the place this evening. I'll write that off to new-restaurant issues, noting that they occur even when a long-established restaurant moves or renovates or opens a new branch.
Actually, Neely's big problem, he says, is a dearth of drivers to deliver pizzas in Mandeville. Who would have guessed that?
More News From The Cool Water Ranch: The dog Suzie returns from the veterinarian with two kinds of pills to help two annoying problems--the worse of which is our old German Shepherd's incontinence. I say we just put her outside except for brief visits inside. Mary Ann says that Suzie will lose her will to live if she is enclosed by a paltry 3000-square-foot fenced yard. It's a prison, MA insists. She is currently proposing that we fence in all five acres so the dog can feel free.
But the best news from the vet is that aside from the old-dog issues, Suzie is in very good health.
[title type="h5"]Neely's Pizza. Mandeville: 4700 Hwy 22. 985-792-7909.[/title]
