Supreme test for deep-dish pizza
Objection, your honor!
A city pizzeria owner has thrown down a deep-dish taunt to blowhard Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia: Put your mouth where my pizza is. A day after the Queens-raised Scalia famously dissed an entire region of the nation by decrying Chicago-style pizza as “not pizza,” a fired-up Emmett Burke defended the 2-inch thick pies he churns out at his shop, Emmett’s.
“New Yorkers have the inferiority complex because the Chicago pizza is getting strong,” says Burke, a Midwestern transplant who opened his MacDougal St. eatery late last year to far better reviews than the one rendered by the High Court’s bombastic jurist.
Burke is so convinced his Chicago-style deep dish is superior that he’s willing to double down on his challenge to Scalia — by asking the Chief Justice of the Supreme Pizza Court of the United States to issue the final ruling: “Scalia can bring in his favorite New York pizza and we’ll bring ours — and we can have Jon Stewart taste it,” Emmett says.
Neither Scalia nor Stewart responded to the restaurateur’s challenge, but we know where Stewart stands on thick-crust pizza in general.
“It’s a f—ing casserole,” he once quipped, likening the pride of the Windy City to “tomato sauce in a bread bowl.”
But that was nothing compared to the bias shown by Scalia, who said last week that Chicago pizza is “very tasty, but ... it shouldn’t be called ‘pizza.’ ” As Burke might say, eat it. “Some people don’t want to call it pizza, but that’s because they may be jealous,” he says, then added his own taunt of the cranky conservative.
“I don’t see a section on his Wikipedia page about his pizza prowess,” says Burke.