Photo Friday: Ravioli Pizza

Ravioli pizza from Bay Ridge Pizza -
exactly what it sounds like.

Who Needs Chocolates or Jewels?

A local pizza joint offers this each Valentine's Day, but I've never come home to find one on the table. Maybe Paul doesn't love me after all. :)

Bleecker Street Pizza, in the Heart of the Village

Anyone making a tour of New York City's must-eat pizza parlors would sooner or later stop at Bleecker Street Pizza.

Not only does it get accolades from the New York Times and the Food Network, but its location at Bleecker Street and 7th Avenue puts it in the heart of the West Village. If you've spent a week in New York and haven't passed within a few blocks of it, I'd be shocked.

Paul got a gift certificate to Bleecker Street Pizza last year, but we hadn't been both in the neighborhood and without dinner plans on any weekend since. But when we planned to see "Norwegian Wood" at the IFC earlier this month, we were going to be just a few blocks away. So our dinner and a movie was really pizza and a movie.

And the pizza is good. I detest folding my pizza in half like so many New Yorkers do, and Bleecker Street's sturdy thin crust gave me no reason to. But the mozzarella sticks stole the show. They were firm and crispy and almost delicious enough I could have forgotten the pizza for another order of sticks.

The location couldn't be any better, but inside it's much closer to your typical hole-in-the-wall restaurant: cramped tables, bad lighting and no space. But none of those things affect the food. While you eat off of paper plates and aluminum containers, you can gaze at the line of photos of celebrities who have given Bleecker Street Pizza a try: Anderson Cooper, Edward Norton and many, many more I barely recognized.

Overall, Bleecker Street Pizza was a quick and cheap stop, with slices much superior to the typical pizza-by-the-slice joints around town. Try the mozzarella sticks.

Grimaldi's: Pizza Under the Brooklyn Bridge

Ask 10 New Yorkers where to get the best pizza, and you'll get 10 different answers.

Ask 100 New Yorkers, however, and there's bound to be some repeats. And one of the pizzerias you'll likely hear over and over again is Grimaldi's.

Grimaldi's fame has spread so far and wide that I'm not sure if the 90 minute line we stood in was filled with more locals or more tourists. My party of four was a bit of both -- Paul and I took my parents there when they visited a few weekends ago.

Grimaldi's is justly famous not only for its pizza, but also for its location. The pizzeria is practically right under the Brooklyn Bridge, truly putting the "Brooklyn" in Brooklyn-style pizza.

In truth, this really was probably the best Brooklyn-style pizza I've had. What I dislike most about standard Brooklyn-style pizza is the floppiness -- I neither want to fold my slice in half before eating it, nor do I think two hands should be a requirement to hold a piece. Grimaldi's coal-brick-oven pizza, however, had a firmer crust while maintaining the lotsa-cheese-to-little-sauce ratio so common on Brooklyn pizzas.

I still prefer both deep dish pizzas and thin, crispy-crust pizzas, but I had no problems polishing off three pieces of Grimaldi's either. And three pieces? That's half a 16-inch pizza. And a 16-inch pizza? That's a small.

The final word: Grimaldi's is delicious and worth a 30-minute wait, especially if you combine your visit with a walk along the East River -- just a stone's throw away -- with its sweeping views of Lower Manhattan.

Mom and I, in front of one of our two "small" pizzas (by Gary R.)

It'saDumbPizzaPlaceName

I'm not a huge fan of New York-style pizza. I don't want to eat a slice folded over. Give me deep dish -- or at least a thin, sturdy crust -- any day.

Despite my feelings, there's certainly no shortage of pizza places in the city. You can find a Ray's on every corner. Or get dollar slices at 2 Bros Pizza. Or visit one of the hundreds of holes in the wall that provide a cheap, cheesy lunch. You can even visit Michael Scott's "favorite local New York pizza joint" -- as declared in an episode of "The Office" that still makes me laugh -- Sbarro.

But by far the silliest place to buy a slice is near my place of work. Don't get me wrong. I've never tried the pizza at this place, so it might be the best thing on sliced crust. C'mon though, is "It'saPizza" really the best name for your enterprise? The mozzarella and pepperoni gave you away-- you don't really need to explain yourself in the restaurant name.

At the very least, why don't you scrounge up some spaces? It's. A. Pizza. Three separate words.