To the list of bygone New York City pleasures, add one more slice of life — the sausage pizza.
While pepperoni and cheese remain the most popular, the sausage slice has been replaced by buffalo chicken and pineapples, artichokes and ziti.
Joe Pozzuoli founded the Greenwich Village institution Joe’s Pizza in 1975 and has seen pizza trends come and go. On a recent trip to Joe’s, four slice pies sat ready — traditional cheese, a fresh-mozzarella pie, pepperoni and a Sicilian.
And the owner of the Carmine Street spot, a favorite of Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, discusses sausage pizza the way a musician might talk about that neighborhood’s folk singers — as a relic of times past.
“It’s fallen off over the past 10, 15 years,” says Pozzuoli. “Thirty years ago, I would order 30 to 40 pounds of sausage a week. Now, I order very little. Two or three pounds.”
When asked why he thinks the topping fell out of favor, even as its cousin, the pepperoni slice, remains popular, this old-school pizzaiolo can only shrug and guess.
“I wish I knew,” he says. “Sausage is more fat. Many people don’t eat fat [anymore].”
Chicken, pineapple slices, jalapeños, all these other toppings are becoming more popular, so [the pizzerias are] phasing sausage out.
- Scott Weiner, Scott's Pizza Tours
It could also be a matter of taste. Long Island native Jamie Roberts was a sausage-slice regular, long attracted to its salty and savory qualities. But these days, the inconsistency of pizzeria sausage has caused the ingredient’s removal from her personal-favorites list.
“I haven’t found a place lately where I like the sausage they use,” says the Whitestone-based music publicist. “Some places use that crumbly, fake kind of sausage. I like when it’s circular — when you cut it.”
Scott Weiner runs Scott’s Pizza Tours, which he says takes people on “historical, cultural and culinary explorations through the New York pizza scene.”
Weiner, like Pozzuoli, places the beginning of the end for sausage love in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and says it can’t be attributed to any one cause. But a more cosmopolitan palate has something to do with it.
“People are not requesting it as much,” he says. “Chicken, pineapple slices, jalapeños, all these other toppings are becoming more popular, so [the pizzerias are] phasing sausage out. Arugula is more popular now, so you’re seeing arugula even on slices,” says Weiner.
“Part of it is the generational change of pizzeria ownership,” he says. “When pizzerias start changing hands more often, there’s less holding onto what was traditional and more selling what people are buying.”
Given the evolution of the modern foodie over the last decade, hearty sausage seems to be a victim of the trend toward greater variety and lighter fare, much in the way that today, unlike in decades past, young foodies are far more likely to go out for sushi or Thai food than to a steakhouse.
“To quote my nephew, the modern foodie is looking for ‘explosions in the mouth,’ ” says Arthur Schwartz, author of “The Southern Italian Table” and a consultant for Italian restaurants. “Perhaps Italian sausage is not explosive enough.”