Dan Pashman:  So, Scott, set the scene. Where are we and what's happening today?

Scott Wiener: So, we’re at the corner of Fulton and Gold Street  in Lower Manhattan, which is where I start every Sunday pizza bus tour. 

Dan Pashman:  And what is the Sunday pizza bus tour? 

Scott Wiener: Sunday pizza bus tour is electric. This is unlike the other tours we do throughout the week that are walking tours where you go to one neighborhood and we go to a bunch of places in that neighborhood.  The Sunday tour, we go around all over the place, wherever the school bus will take us. So it's the most improvisational tour, and it's like, the one that's definitely the most interesting because the most can go wrong. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]  What's the thing that went the most wrong on one of these tours?

Scott Wiener: You know, it – fortunately, it hasn't gotten that bad because it’s always salvageable, but there have been times where I'm like, ‘Oh, I forgot that today is the five borough bike tour.’  Oh, there was one time there was a car show on Arthur Avenue, and I was like, okay, we're going to park the bus a block away, everybody will find us. Everybody didn't find us, Dan. I left two people in the Bronx. 

Dan Pashman: Oh, no!

Scott Wiener: That was – okay, scratch what I said about nothing ever going wrong.

[LAUGHTER]

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies, it’s for eaters. I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. 

Dan Pashman: This week, we’re going on a food field trip with pizza obsessive Scott Wiener. He’s the guy behind Scott’s Pizza Tours, a company that offers tours of New York City’s most notable pizzerias. Now, Scott started this business on his own back in 2008… but the company has grown a lot since then.

Ryan Seacrest: Alright, excited. We’re gonna meet Scott from Scott’s pizza tour. And look at the ride…

Dan Pashman: In 2018, Scott gave a tour to Ryan Secrest for an episode of Live with Kelly and Ryan.

Ryan Seacrest: Why do you like Lombardi’s?

Scott Wiener:  It's a coal fired oven. Fast bake. Crunchy on the outside. Soft on the inside. Perfect balance.

Ryan Seacrest: Everything I want to hear.

Dan Pashman: Scott’s been running his company for 17 years now. It’s become so popular he’s had to hire a whole team of people to help him lead all the different tours. They take eaters through all five boroughs of New York City to try a range of pizza styles – Neapolitan, Sicilian, deep-dish, coal-fired, wood fired. Over the years, Scott’s made a name for himself as one of the most passionate and knowledgeable pizza experts in America. And he never stops doing research, although he limits himself to 15 slices per week. 

Dan Pashman: If all this sounds familiar, that’s because we had Scott on the show back in 2018. In that episode, we heard he’s not just obsessed with pizza -- he’s fanatical about anything relating to pizza, which is why he has the Guinness Record for the world’s largest collection of pizza boxes -- he’s now got nearly 2000 of them from all over the world, so many that he’s had to move them into a storage unit.

Dan Pashman: But, back when I first interviewed Scott, he was keeping all those boxes in his apartment. Here’s a bit of that conversation.

Scott Wiener:  Okay, so well now we're in my office, which has two stacks of pizza boxes that have been photographed but not logged into my spreadsheet. So I catalog all the boxes. 

Dan Pashman: It’s a big spreadsheet. 

Dan Pashman: Clearly, as I learned the first time I interviewed Scott, when you turn your passion into your day job, there’s no such thing as leaving work at the office. Which made me wonder– 

Dan Pashman:  How has this career path influenced your dating life?

Scott Wiener: [LAUGHS] Oh, what a funny question. Um, it’s interesting because I try to stay away from talking about my job if I, like, first meet somebody, I try to stay away from even talking about it.

Dan Pashman:  Yeah, you’re trying to play it cool early on.

Scott Wiener: Yeah! And I’m terr – like, I’m worried about – it’s so easy for this to take over a whole conversation. But I’m, I also know that it’s very much truly me. So, it’s okay if I’m getting to know somebody, they will need to know this at some point. But maybe not the first five minutes of like, ‘Hey, how you doing? Hey, I gotta tell you about this pizza I saw yesterday, listen to this.’ 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]  I would save the discussion of the spreadsheet for the second date.

Scott Wiener:  [LAUGHS] I mean, if that comes up and she’s into it, then hey, I’ll buy a ring.  

Dan Pashman:  [LAUGHS] Has anyone you’ve ever been dating said something along the lines of, I think you love pizza more than me?

Scott Wiener: Yeah, everyone! Everyone! Oh, no. And, you know, maybe it’s, it was acted as if it was in jest, but I know the truth. Look, I love pizza, but I really don’t think I’m insane. 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: We’ll return to the topic of Scott’s love life later. But now, let’s get to that field trip. This past January, I met back up with Scott for one of his famous Sunday bus tours. His company offers a lot of different kinds of tours, but this one is special for a couple of reasons. It’s the only one Scott consistently leads, and while the others are walking tours that stay in one neighborhood, this is the only one with a bus, which allows Scott to cover more ground. He promises to take you to four pizzerias with diverse styles, in at least two different boroughs of New York City.

Dan Pashman: Scott starts every Sunday tour at Keste Pizza and Vino in Lower Manhattan. But the other three stops change every time – Scott improvises the itinerary based on his read of the crowd. There’s about 30 of us on the tour today, including my wife Janie and our kids Becky and Emily. It’s a mix of local New Yorkers and tourists from across the US, South America and Europe. 

Dan Pashman: As the group assembles, Scott chats everyone up to learn about their previous pizza-eating and pizza-making experiences. It helps him plan his route. Sometimes, he doesn’t know where he’s going next until just 15 minutes before. But he’s so tapped into the New York pizza scene that he can secure a reservation at a moment’s notice. And if one of the places he wants to go doesn’t pan out?

Scott Wiener:  I'll reroute. There's 3,000 pizzerias in the city. 

Dan Pashman: Once everyone’s seated inside Keste, Scott gives us the rundown. He explains that the point of the tour is not just to taste a bunch of pizza – he wants us to really pay attention to what we’re eating and evaluate it scientifically. That’s why he gives everyone a pocket pizza journal and mini pencil, to take notes.

Scott Wiener:  We do cheese pizza at every stop. Cheese, sauce, crust. We don't add anything else because that will skew the scientific method. I want the variable to be the pizzeria itself. So, that's why, when we're at the pizzeria, as you're eating, you should be jotting down your personal tasting notes. Come on in, come on in. 

Dan Pashman: Midway through Scott’s spiel, two more people walk into the restaurant and join our group. 

Scott Wiener:  Um, we're talking about, we're talking about cheese to sauce ratio and we're talking about structural integrity of crust. I still, I'm – you gotta hide those boxes from me. I can't concentrate on anything else right now. They brought boxes. You guys are in Sao Paulo? Oh, my gosh.

Dan Pashman: The two latecomers brought gifts -- new additions to Scott’s pizza box collection -- from a pizzeria in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Scott’s like a puppy who just heard the word “treat.”

Scott Wiener: Oh, my god. Yes. Can I really have this?

Man from Brazil: For you.

Scott Wiener: I will, I, woah.

Dan Pashman: Scott is very excited.

Scott Wiener: I can’t breathe.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Scott forces himself to settle down and get back on track. He tells us about the restaurant we’re at – Keste. It’s a Neapolitan pizzeria and stop number one on the tour. He tells everyone to get up and follow him into the kitchen to get a good look at the oven.

Scott Wiener: The way that it’s designed is to trap as much heat as possible. So that's why this style of pizza, Neapolitan pizza, is always baked at high temperatures for a very short amount of time. In fact, right now, we're at 750 Fahrenheit, which is 400 Celsius.

Dan Pashman:  Scott just, Scott just pulled an instant-read thermometer out of his pocket. 

Scott Wiener: That's the temperature of this oven right now, and it's the beginning of the day.

Dan Pashman:  Like an infrared thermometer.

Scott Wiener: And in fact, that’s just the temperature of the floor of the oven.

Dan Pashman: I love that nobody on this tour thought it was strange that Scott had an infrared thermometer in his pocket.

Scott Wiener: …really, really hot. So, reason for that is because pizza first evolved, like way back in the day before we had pizza in New York, it came out of southern Italy, in and around Naples. And the reason that pizza developed the way it did, is because pizza wasn't originally made as a food, it was made as a tool. 

Dan Pashman: As Scott explains, the first people to make pizza in southern Italy were bread bakers in the mid-1700s. Back then, they weren’t trying to make pizza – they were just trying to cool down their ovens.

Scott Wiener:  So you see how this oven’s really hot, right? If you were a bread baker, you would build a fire in the inside of the oven and the fire would heat up the oven and that's when bread bakers would start baking breads. But the problem is, the oven floors were so hot that they would burn the first bunch of breads.

Dan Pashman: Just so we’re clear, these ovens have no racks, so the floor of the oven is not only the bottom, it’s also the surface you put the dough on. But for these bakers back in the day, when the fire first really got going, the floor was too hot. So bakers would toss circles of dough onto their oven floors, purely for the purpose of absorbing heat. Problem was, plain dough would puff up into a balloon when baking, so hardly any of it was touching the oven floor -- which meant it wasn’t serving its purpose of absorbing heat and cooling the oven. The solution? Put something on the dough to weigh it down, to keep it flat. Toppings. According to Scott, when bakers first put toppings on flat dough, pizza was born. 

Scott Wiener: Pizza, in my definition, is a leavened dough that gets stretched, topped, then baked.  So when people try to argue that, ‘Oh, so, deep dish pizza's not a pizza.’ I say, no, of course it is. Dough that you top and then bake – pizza.

Dan Pashman: But it took time for those early toppings to change, for pizza to evolve into the food we know today.

Scott Wiener:  If you think with the mind of a, you know, mid-18th century bread baker in southern Italy, you're using whatever is available, whatever's cheap, and whatever's edible, which would have, at that time, been lard, fish paste. 

Dan Pashman: Scott says tomatoes didn’t enter the equation until the early 1800s. Any fresh produce would’ve been too expensive and hard to come by to be used just for pizza, which at the time was a food eaten only by poor Italians.

Scott Wiener:  Pizza was not a celebrated food. It was a part of the culture, it was a part of the street culture, and the people who ate it are what are called the Lazzaroni, the beggars, the street folks.  

Dan Pashman: In the late 18 and early 1900s, there was an influx of poorer Southern Italian immigrants to America, and pizza eventually became hugely popular here. Only then, starting around 1950, did pizza become more commonly eaten across Italy.

Scott Wiener:  So, this in my hand here is a Neapolitan pizza.

Dan Pashman: Scott pulls a freshly baked, Neapolitan-style pizza out of the oven that we’re all standing around. 

Scott Wiener: It's also so soft and puffy on the edge that when you poke it with your finger, it pops right back up. This is where this style of pizza is really, really good. 

Dan Pashman: He leads our group out of the kitchen and back to our tables to try our first slice of the day.

Scott Wiener:  When the pizza lands at your table,  you're gonna put your plate right next to the slice you want and then you're gonna do the snag and drag. Snag the slice, pull it horizontally onto your plate. 

Dan Pashman: Alright, first pizza, first slice. Keste.

Emily: The crust is really good.

Dan Pashman: This is my daughter Emily.

Dan Pashman:  To me, what makes this crust so good, you notice how it's like, crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside, and it's that combination of being crispy and chewy together is special, and that’s very hard to find in pizza crusts.

Dan Pashman: The sauce is also excellent. The only ingredients in it are fresh raw tomato and salt. After finishing our slices, I go over to the couple that brought Scott pizza boxes all the way from Sao Paolo. It turns out they own seven pizzerias across southeastern Brazil. Last year, they competed in the World Pizza Championship and came in second for the best Roman-style pizza in the country. For them, coming on one of Scott’s tours is a sort of pilgrimage. I was curious to get their thoughts on the pizza at Keste.

Woman from Brazil: Amazing!

Man from Brazil: Very amazing. The fermentation is perfect. I think it’s very good.

Woman from Brazil: The smells of the dough are very amazing.

Dan Pashman: I didn’t smell the dough! Next pizzeria I’m gonna smell the dough. 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: After everyone’s finished their slices, it’s time to head to stop number two.

Scott Wiener: When we leave the first stop, people always say, ‘Oh, I’m so hungry, I need more,’ and I’m like, just wait. Trust me about this.

Dan Pashman: Scott leads our group out of the restaurant and onto the street, where we find the defining feature of the Sunday tour.

Dan Pashman:  Oh, look, it says “Pizza Bus” on it.  

Dan Pashman: It’s a big yellow school bus. 

Scott Wiener:  Okay, pizza buddies. Welcome to the school bus. 

Dan Pashman: We climb in and head towards the second stop. But only Scott and the driver know where we’re going. Remember, the Sunday pizza bus tour is improvised.

Scott Wiener: So we just crossed under the Brooklyn Bridge. And then we're gonna go under the Manhattan Bridge. And we're gonna be cruising up the east side of Manhattan. 

Dan Pashman: On our way there, Scott asks if anyone has any questions about what we’ve seen so far. Someone in the back raises their hand.

Scott Wiener: So, Karen’s question is about why is pizza better in New York than it is in other cities? My first response is, it’s not – it doesn’t have to be better. Pizza can be equally as good in every other place on the planet. Like, Lindsey was just joking about, ‘People say, oh it’s because of the water.’ It is 100% not about the water. Our water doesn’t have anything extra that nobody else has. What it has is less. Low, pretty low in chlorine, especially in the winter. And that just means you can match our water pretty easily by filtering and doing like, pretty simple filtration systems that anybody can get. What it is about a place like New York is culture. It’s not that the pizza can’t be better in other places, it’s that there’s no reason for it to match the style that we have here. 

Dan Pashman: Because slice joints are such a huge part of New York culture, there are pizzerias everywhere, which means a lot of competition and a discerning customer base, which creates pressure to make better pizza. It’s the same reason why barbecue is, on average, still better in the parts of the country known for barbecue, even though you can smoke meat anywhere.

Dan Pashman: Anyway, after about 20 minutes, we arrive at our destination.

Scott Wiener:   Okay, so we're up First Avenue between 117th and 118th Street. I'm taking you to the original Patsy's in East Harlem, which has a coal-fired oven. So this way we can learn more about the difference between this and other oven types and all those other details, alright? Ready to rumble?  Let’s go. You hungry?

Dan Pashman: The pizza at the original Patsy’s is coal-fired, and it's made in the same oven they used when the restaurant first opened in 1933. Patsy’s was one of New York’s first pizzerias, alongside Lombardi's, Totonno's and John's. Today, there are a handful of spinoff locations under other ownership, but only this one and the one in Brooklyn still use a coal-fired oven.

Dan Pashman: So, before we eat, Scott takes us into the kitchen to see the oven in action. 

Scott Wiener: Watch your step here.

Dan Pashman: Pizza’s coming through.

Dan Pashman: When Scott spots two pizzas that are about to go in, he pulls out his phone to time how long they take to bake. 

Scott Wiener: Now these are going in. Two regular pies.

Dan Pashman: We all crowd around the oven, which Scott’s infrared thermometer tells us is about 750 degrees. The coal inside burns dayglow orange.

Scott Wiener: Boom. Three minutes, 20 seconds. And it looks perfect. Still bubbling.

Dan Pashman: With two pies freshly out of the oven, it's time to eat. Scott still has his thermometer in his hand.

Dan Pashman: Scott,  uh, how often do you break out the infrared thermometer at home? 

Scott Wiener:  Infrared is an important part of every day. Every day. I wake up, I shoot it out the window toward the sun. I want to know what the weather's gonna be like.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: This time, Scott measures the temperature of the cheese on top of the pizza as it comes out of the oven and lands on our tables. He doesn’t want any burned mouths, we’re only at stop number two. And a burned mouth at Patsy’s specifically is a real concern, because of the type of cheese they use.

Scott Wiener:  It's called low moisture mozzarella. It's more fat. So this comes out hotter. 

Dan Pashman: Alright, our pizza’s coming. This looks beautiful. Let it cool. Scott, Scott, what's the temperature of the surface of our pizza right now?

Scott Wiener:  Okay, so this is where, this one's gonna be hotter. 187, so.

Dan Pashman: Don't eat it yet.

Dan Pashman: The cheese pizza at Patsy’s is extra thin and crispy, with shredded mozzarella on top and a more savory sauce than what we had at Keste. Picture an upscale version of a classic New York slice.

Dan Pashman:  What temp are we at now? Let's check the temp of the cheese again.

Scott Wiener:  So it's been a couple minutes, so my bet is that it's around 176. Oh, down lower! 165. 

Dan Pashman:  So we’re safe?

Scott Wiener: Golden territory, guys.

Dan Pashman: Alright, chow down.

Scott Wiener: Golden.

Janie: This crust is pretty good.

Dan Pashman: This is my wife Janie and our other daughter Becky.

Becky: This is, um, very good, but the crust, like, at the top of the slice, looks less soft than the other one.

Dan Pashman: Little more crispy, yeah. I mean, I do love the thinness of this crust. I think the flavor is great. But I  think that difference of the uncooked tomato sauce that they use at Keste, that they put tomatoes on, the only cooking is in the oven, gives it more of a fresh tomato taste, which I, I kind of prefer versus the sort of stewed tomato taste. 

Janie: Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: What are your thoughts?

Emily: For the  first one, I rated it an 8.7. 

Dan Pashman: And what'd you rate this one?

Emily: Um, 8 point…no. Cause it's 8.5 – 8.57.

Dan Pashman: Oh, so, this is better? You're rating it. 

Emily: No. The other one's gonna be 8.85. This one's gonna be 8.57. 

Dan Pashman: Wow, oh, it just got promoted.

Emily: Nope, 8.58. Actually, 8.5789. No, 8.5897.

Dan Pashman: Oh. [LAUGHS]

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: Coming up, the tour continues, when we try two more styles of pizza in two other boroughs of New York. 

Dan Pashman: I feel like because there’s been time in between each slice, each slice that I eat, Scott, I just get more hungry.

Scott Wiener: That’s the goal. You should not feel full until after the fourth one. But when you get to the fourth, you should look at it and be like, I know my body’s done, but my heart is not.

Dan Pashman: Then later, has Scott found someone who can capture a bigger slice of his heart than pizza? We’ll find out, stick around.

+++ BREAK +++

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. I’m leading another pasta tour of Italy this fall with my friends at Culinary Backstreets and spots are filling up fast! In addition to eating in Rome with the one and only Katie Parla and trying multiple versions of spaghetti all’assassina in the city where it was invented, we’ll have other surprises. Last time we visited a vineyard in Lecce, met the orecchiette ladies of Bari, and ate freshly baked focaccia with a view of the Adriatic Sea. Damn, I could go for a piece of that focaccia right now. Anyway, this trip is so special, you’ll have a blast, learn a ton, and eat really really well. But it’s almost sold out! For more info and to reserve your spot, go to culinary backstreets dot com slash sporkful.

Dan Pashman: Okay, back to Scott’s pizza tour. After a lot of careful consideration from Emily…

Emily: You know what? Yeah, 8.6.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: We leave Patsy’s…

Dan Pashman: Back on the bus.

Dan Pashman:…and head to the third stop on the tour.

Scott Wiener:  So, we're still in Manhattan in East Harlem. And we will be departing this borough now. We're gonna be going into Queens.  

Dan Pashman: Along the way, Scott tells us about the history of New York City pizzeria naming conventions.

Scott Wiener:  Most pizzerias at the time, in the early 1900s, most pizzerias in New York were just called Pizzeria Napolitana. It's like saying ‘ice cream shop.’ You know, it's just telling you what it is. Later, they started calling them by the names of the proprietors. So to differentiate between one and another, you would say, Patsy's, or Lombardi's, or whatever. And that's why those pizzerias, they were not called Patsy's, Lombardi's, and John's on day one. It wasn't until, like, you know, the 30's and 40's, that's when we started to get name differences in pizzerias. 

Dan Pashman: About 20 minutes later, we pull up to stop number three – a newer place called Beebe’s in Long Island City, Queens. It’s located on the first floor of a hipster chic hotel. 

Dan Pashman: Now, at our first two stops, we ate pizza with roots in the early 1900’s. Scott brought us here to try American artisan style pizza, emblematic of what’s in style this century.

Dan Pashman:  Alright, pizza number three. I'm going in.

Dan Pashman: I can hear the crunch in that bite.

Janie: This was my favorite sauce. I want this sauce and cheese on Keste’s crust.

Dan Pashman:  Really? This is so thin and so crispy. I don’t know, they’re all pretty amazing.

Emily: Now I have to try to give it a rating.

Dan Pashman:  Okay.

Emily: 8.589.

Dan Pashman:  And where does that put it? That puts it into second place?

Emily: No, third. Cause the crust – I don't know. It’s very hard, you know?

Dan Pashman:  Well, this is the thinnest one we’ve had so far.

Emily: Yeah, and it, like, breaks when you fold it.

Dan Pashman:  It’s kind of brittle, yeah.

Dan Pashman: Not brittle enough for Emily to leave on her plate, though.

Dan Pashman:  Um, do you need any help finishing your crust?

Emily: It’s okay.

Dan Pashman: While people finish eating, I check in with Scott about the final stop. He admits to me that while stops 2 and 3 weren’t confirmed until today, he had some idea of where he wanted to go for those. But now, things are getting interesting.

Scott Wiener:  For the next stop, I have nothing pre-planned. Like, I have nothing even on hold. That one's going to be a complete audible.

Dan Pashman: A few minutes later, someone on the tour asks Scott a question that gets him very excited.

Scott Wiener:  So your question is, what are my thoughts on pan baked pizzas? This is an incredible question.  Every pizza we've had so far today baked directly on the floor of the oven. Now our next stop has to be not baked on the floor. We need to see a difference. 

Dan Pashman: Since the first three slices were baked on the floor, Scott wants stop number four to feature a pizza baked in a pan.

Dan Pashman: Did you just make a decision in your mind about the fourth stop?

Scott Wiener:  Not one decision, but now I've narrowed it down to two places that I'm thinking about going. So now I'm pulling out my map. I got my Google map. Well, there’s a place  right there that's really good. And there's a place right there that I really like. I'm actually eliminating one place that I was thinking about going. Oh, but now as I zoom in, I realize there's another place that now I'm thinking about going again.

Dan Pashman: Oh, alright.

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: After Beebe’s, we get back on the bus… 

Dan Pashman: And we’re moving.

Dan Pashman: …and set a course for the last pizzeria of the day. 

Dan Pashman: Alright, here we are, stop number four. Let’s do it.

Emily: Stop number four, indeed!

Dan Pashman: For our final slice, Scott’s brought us to Brooklyn to try Il Porto Ristorante in Clinton Hill. We follow him inside and find a section of tables reserved for our group. Il Porto is best known for their grandma-style pizza, which is baked in a pan. Sicilian pizza is also baked in a pan, but Scott explains the difference. 

Scott Wiener: The grandma pizza is characterized by its shape and its thickness. So a grandma is always a rectangular pizza, which includes squares. It can be square, it's fine. Now, any style of pizza can have the sauce on top of the cheese, like you see here. But I think sometimes people assume a square pizza with sauce on top of the cheese means it's a grandma. And I see people asking me about famous pizzerias like L&B Spumoni Gardens, which is sauce on top of cheese. But it is very much a Sicilian pizza at that place. Grandma pizza is thin and crunchier, a Sicilian is thicker and puffier. I want to let you guys dive into this.

Dan Pashman: As Scott talks, four grandma slices are dropped off at our table. 

Dan Pashman:  This is outstanding. 

Becky: This is my favorite one.

Emily: [CHEWING SOUNDS]

Dan Pashman: Emily, you’re in charge of crunch sound effects today.

Emily: [LAUGHS] What was your favorite pizza?

Dan Pashman:  Probably Kesté I'd say. My sort of quick reviews are Kesté, I love that the crust was crispy and chewy at the same time. Patsy's was very thin. It was more salty. It was more oily. It was a thinner, crispier crust. And then the third one, also very good, but that crust was a little bit too thin for my taste. I mean it was very good, but it was almost like a cracker and I want a little bit of chewiness. Kesté had the chewiness. 

Dan Pashman: Upon further reflection, I wanna revise my ratings. I wanna put the grandma at Il Porto tied with Keste. The crackly crust from the pan was so nice and the sauce was insane. It’s very different from the others so it’s a little hard for me to really put them head to head. But biting into her grandma slice, Emily didn’t have any issue…

Emily: This is the best one.

Dan Pashman:  Yeah?

Emily: This is like, 9.8

Dan Pashman:  Wow! That’s crushing–

Emily: …give it a 10.

Dan Pashman:  Woah! 10?

Janie: 10? It can’t get any better?

Emily: This is great.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman:  Alright. Thanks, everyone!

Scott Wiener: We’re ready to roll. 

Dan Pashman: After Il Porto, the bus takes us back to Keste, where we started the tour. 

Scott Wiener: We’re gonna cruise over the Manhattan Bridge, so check it out. If you look out of the port side to the left, you’ll be seeing the Brooklyn Bridge and the sun shine. Thank you guys for coming out, have a slice day. I’ll see you in the future.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: For me, there are two foods in the world that, when I have a really good version of it, the more of it I eat, the hungrier I seem to get. One of those foods is steak, and the other is pizza. And apparently I'm not alone in that feeling because after the tour ends, my family and I get a table at Keste and order three more pizzas for the table. Scott joins me, which is good, because I have a few more questions for him.

Dan Pashman: As you heard at the beginning, Scott’s first love was and will always be pizza. But in the last few years, it’s been bumped down in the hierarchy of his loves.

Dan Pashman: Do you want to tell me your name?

Shelby: Shelby.

Dan Pashman: This is Scott’s daughter Shelby – she’s almost two.

Elena: We met online.

Dan Pashman: And this is his wife Elena. They met in 2018, not long after our first episode with Scott aired.

Elena: We both were drawn to each other because of the – we each had some food element in our profiles. Scott was making homemade pizza and I had a picture in Hawaii of eating some poke. So we were–

Dan Pashman: What did your profile say, Scott?

Scott Wiener: Mine didn't say anything about pizza. I think there was a picture where you can not even tell I was in a pizzeria, but it said something about wanting to make fresh pasta. Like, wanting to learn how to make fresh pasta. And I think that's – I remember you were interested in that and saying, ‘Oh, that's interesting that you want to learn fresh pasta.’

Dan Pashman: Scott didn’t hit Elena with the full intensity of his pizza obsession right away. But when they started messaging back and forth, they did bond over a shared passion for food. 

Scott Wiener: Oh yeah, of course. It wouldn't have gotten any further if that wasn't the case. 

Dan Pashman: Right.

Scott Wiener: I mean, food's extremely important to me. 

Elena: To both of us, yeah.

Dan Pashman: So after some messages were exchanged, they had their first date. But Scott continued to play it cool on the pizza front. So when the obligatory “what do you do for work?” question came up…

Scott Wiener:  I'm sure I didn't say, ‘Oh, I run a pizza tour company in the city.’ Like, I would have been vague about like, ‘Oh, I work in food education,’ or, or something, you know, something like that. Even the word ‘pizza,’ I probably would have left out.

Dan Pashman: For their second date, they went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn. 

Elena: Well, then after we ate there, we walked down the street because he wanted to show me Paulie Gee's pizzeria.

Scott Wiener: Because you had mentioned being interested in the interior design. 

Elena: We ran into the owners and it became a whole – and then I found out that he had been on with Ryan Seacrest, like the day before doing a tour with him, so it just–

Dan Pashman: So you expressed interest in the interior design of a pizzeria. Scott took you by, you ran into the owners, of course the owners of any noteworthy pizzeria in New York know Scott. And so they are like, ‘Hey, Scott!’ And you're like, ‘Who is, like, how is he best friends with the owner?’ And then the next thing out of his mouth is like, ‘Hey, I saw you with Ryan Seacrest yesterday,’ and you're like, ‘What?’

Elena: Yep. Yep. That's pretty much how it unfolded. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Scott’s cover was blown. But as the magnitude of his obsession became clear to Elena, she wasn’t scared off. In fact, it turns out their jobs have some things in common.  

Scott Wiener:  Elena's an architect and she’s done a lot of work with the Department of Buildings and all this stuff with the city, and I think when we first met, you know, as I was trying to connect with you more about architecture, I would bring out like, well and I collect blueprints from old bakery ovens and, you know, I go to municipal archive and dig this stuff up. And there was that weird connection of like, oh wait, you use these resources for a completely different reason, but there’s a lot of crossover.

Dan Pashman: Still, it took a while before Elena found out about Scott’s spreadsheet. The one that catalogs his pizza box collection.

Elena: I don't think it was until I was already moved in.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Scott Wiener: Really? 

Elena: Remember we sat at the – we, I helped you fill out the spreadsheet. 

Scott Wiener: Yeah. 

Elena: Uh,  I mean, I love spreadsheets, so, um, it would’ve been fine. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: So that might’ve been a turn on.

Scott Wiener: I mean, look – yeah. 

Elena: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: You know what they say – find someone who looks at you the way you look at spreadsheets. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: My thanks to Scott Wiener of Scott’s Pizza Tours. I gotta say, whether you’re a New Yorker looking for a fun activity or visiting from out of town, Scott’s tours are so fun and incredibly delicious, they’re one of the few activities that I think are phenomenal for locals and tourists alike. See all the options and sign up at Scott's pizza tours dot com. 

Dan Pashman: Next week on the show I talk with comedian Matteo Lane, whose hilarious cooking videos on Instagram have led him to write a cookbook, entitled Your Pasta Sucks. That’s next week.

Dan Pashman: While you wait for that one, check out last week’s show featuring Michelle Zauner of the indie band Japanese Breakfast. We talk about her memoir, Crying In H Mart, and how cooking helped her grieve her mother’s death.

Dan Pashman: Finally remember to reserve your spot now for my pasta tour of Italy, go to culinarybackstreets.com/sporkful.