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By Ed Levine
Ed Levine, founder of Serious Eats and host of the “Special Sauce” podcast, has eaten slices of pizza in 25 states.
Rexburg, Idaho, may be one of the more unexpected places to find a world-class slice of New York-style pizza. The windswept city, home to B.Y.U.-Idaho, is a three-hour drive from the nearest major airport and 2,200 miles from Manhattan. But from its electric oven, Righteous Slice is serving pizza that would not be out of place in Greenwich Village.
With a proper char on the bottom, the slices stand up to a fold. They are topped with low-moisture whole mozzarella and Grana Padano; the sauce carries the perfect faint sweetness of high-quality canned and steamed tomatoes, and is ringed by a beautiful three-inch-high cornicione, or raised lip, that has numerous charred air bubbles. The crust is thicker and not quite as crisp as, say, a slice at Joe’s Pizza on Carmine Street. But then Joe’s doesn’t have the Grand Tetons out on the horizon.
“Nobody expects smart pizza in Rexburg,” said Bill Crawford, owner of Righteous Slice. “It’s a small network with masses of farmers, price-sensitive academics and one of the most active Little Caesar’s in the United States. But I came up with a clever pizza that every other person would crave because it was delicious.
Mr. Crawford has never lived in New York City. In fact, he grew up in a double-wide trailer in eastern Oregon. And he had never worked in a pizzeria before he started making Neapolitan-style pizzas in a mobile wood-burning oven towed to farmer’s markets in Rexburg eight years ago. He was an Air Force pilot who flew combat missions in Iraq before earning a master’s degree from Harvard Business School.
“Our New York-style pizza has been the main driver of our growth since we introduced it about three years ago,” he said. “We are now pretty much maxed out on our capacity, but demand keeps growing.”
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