Just the other day I was reading some blogs and discovered something… a new innovation in pizza technology. Now, by no means am I a food connoisseur or a pizza fanatic, but just an ordinary person who sometimes gets excited by simple things. Pizza cone is not just an ordinary thing though! How often does a revolution in pizza technology occur? The last major innovation could arguably be the creation of the stuffed crust pizza, back in ’95. After doing some research I realized that pizza cone has been around for a couple years now, but since its arrival in NYC, it will certainly now become a cultural phenomenon. I now present my recount of my Pizza Cone adventure.
February 25, 2010
5:30 p.m.
I leave Charlottesville, Virginia on the Starlight Express bus to NYC, seeking out K! Pizzacone. I am worried about the perilous roads ahead because of the category 5 blizzard that is hitting the Northeast and am certainly not comforted by the fact that my driver was in training and it was his first run. I had to ignore that though, I was on a mission.
8:52 p.m.
We reach the halfway point in our bus ride to NYC. Still no snow.
9:30 p.m.
We’re now in Pennsylvania and I can begin to see the blizzard ahead.
10:45 p.m.
We can no longer see the road and visibility is at a minimum. The snow is blanketing everywhere and the wind is rocking the bus pretty hard. Several cars are stopping on the highway and we narrowly miss several. We press on.
12:32 a.m.
We arrive in NYC. I head to my shack of a hotel room to spend the night with my friend Andrew in order to rest for the next day’s adventure.
February 25, 2010
11:32 a.m.
It’s really nice to sleep in. We wake up and go drop our things off at the bus so that we can make the trek over to K! Pizzacone. The streets are pretty bad and only some of the roads have been plowed. We feel like a cab ride would not be very safe given the conditions, so we decide to rough it out and walk the 30 blocks to the Pizzacone haven on 5th Ave.
12:47 p.m.
We arrive. Here is a shot my friend Andrew took of the front door.
This other shot is of the logo “K!”
12:48 p.m.
Well… now going at lunchtime didn’t seem like a good idea. Oh well. I didn’t come 6 hours to NYC to be phased by a crowd
1:18 p.m.
We finally get to the front of the line and are able to order. My mouth is literally watering at this point. For me it seemed like a pretty good deal. All the toppings/stuffings I want for just a dollar more than the price for just cheese.
I wonder how far they deliver…
The packaging method for people that are getting a pizzacone to go is actually pretty impressive. Here is a shot of the outside of some boxes…
…And here are the insides. I’m not really sure what these people ordered or if they were shooting me weird looks for taking pictures of their food, but I think the first one is veggie, the second is some sort of breakfast mix, and the third is a plain one.
After 18 hours I still hadn’t decided what I was going to order. So many choices! I finally decided on peppers, prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, and grilled chicken.
Here is a photo of the chef making my cuisine. They take all of the ingredients, minus the sauce, and blend it all in a bowl. They actually have the pizza cones themselves shipped from a bakery in Connecticut. I guess the space they have is too small to make them themselves. They then ladle some sauce into a cone and then pack in the ingredients into the top of the cone. They sprinkle some more cheese on top of all of that to really fancy it up. After all that, they popped my delicious treat into the oven for about 5 minutes. Yum. At this point I got way to excited and completely forgot about taking pictures, so my apologies for that.
When I first discovered K! Pizzacone, many people doubted my adventure. They told me how it was stupid for me the travel such a long distance for something that could simply be achieved by just rolling up a piece of pizza. I was hoping that my first bite would prove them all wrong. My long, arduous trek to a city hundreds of miles away was about to climax in one single moment. My arms trembled with excitement as I lifted my pizza-ey chalice out of its K! Pizzacone box palace towards my mouth. I could feel it steaming in my hands. It was time to indulge.
It was definitely worth the trip.
Yow! First of all, the dough is not quite like that of a pizza. It is a little harder and more like the crust of a calzone… actually… that’s pretty close to what it is. It’s like a super thick, but not sweet, ice cream cone. I started just by nibbling around the top of the cone to try it out. The cone itself was actually pretty tasty. Crunchy, but not hard like day old pizza crust. I then took a giant bite out of the side of the cone and got a bit of everything. Flavor explosion. All of the ingredients combined perfectly and seemed really fresh. The sauce was actually some of the best pizza sauce I’ve had. That, plus the slight crunch of the cone just seemed like pizza perfection. It was delicious. One of the best things about eating a pizzacone was definitely how clean it was. I didn’t get any grease dripping onto my hands and I was easily able to eat it with one hand… like an ice cream cone. Definitely the most satisfying part of eating my pizzacone was the last bite. It reminded me of the final part of a drumstick, where you get cone, chocolate, and ice cream all at once. It was pretty similar to that with my pizzacone, but with a nice puddle of sauce at the bottom to wash my toppings down with.
Overall, the experience was fantastic. I got to have an awesome trip to NYC and try out an innovation in pizza technology. Some may say that this is merely a novelty, but I believe that this is a pretty awesome concept and I would love to see this spread. I mean, come on, it’s pizza in a cone! It really just makes me wonder, “Why didn’t I think of this first?”
Thanks to Andrew for accompanying me and thanks to Kendall for this blog and letting me take the day off of work to embark on this mission of pizza proportions.
-alex
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