Theron Shan

"Okay, guys," Raiden greeted his class once they had assembled at Portalocity and he'd fired off a text to Arden promising her a make-up pizza when she wasn't a bird any more. You know, very normal teacher concerns. "Today, we're following pizza in its journey to the United States, which is where it really took off. You see, Italian immigrants brought their food with them to the US, but like many immigrant groups they not only had to adapt to the ingredients available here, they had access to a wider range of ingredients, so they could do all sorts of new and interesting things. Specifically for our case, Sicilian immigrants from southern Italy had more access to meat and cheese, ingredients that were scarcer and more expensive in their seafood-rich region but plentiful in northern Italy. So don't listen to anyone who ever starts snitting at you about 'authentic' food, because it's a scam. Does the food taste good? Yes? Then who cares if it's authentic? No? Then it doesn't matter if it's authentic. Case closed. But I'm wandering off the point.

"One of the things these Italian immigrants brought with them was, you guessed it, pizza, and in New York is where it really started to take off. I'm not about to start an argument about which is the best kind of pizza--they're all winners to me--but New Yorkers get really heated about it. They favor a thin-crust pizza sold in large slices people like to fold. It's a thing. Today we're going to Harlem to try out Patsy's, opened in 1933 by Pasquale Lanceri and recently featured in a hit movie. A bunch of these old New York pizzerias have their own individual claims to fame, and Patsy's is that they claim to have been the first to sell pizza by the slice. The first in New York, maybe, but remember, that's how pizza was originally sold in those open-air stands in Naples. Ah, but that doesn't matter. C'mon, let's go try some pizza and explore Spanish Harlem.