First, a note to Slashfood readers:  I apologize for missing pizza day.  Not that anybody cares.  But I feel badly about it.  My long displacement kept me from regularly posting, but now, having landed at my new headquarters here in beautiful Midwood, I’m ready to resume my subliterary labors.  I’ll start with my tardy post on the unpredictable genius of Domenic DeMarco.  And early next week I’ll report on my experience this weekend as a judge at the Long Island Pizza Festival. Writing in Newsday some months ago, I penned the following paen to Dom:

"One man - bent, driven, possessed - towers over the world of pizza. His name is spoken of in hushed tones by the circle of believers; his work is subsumed in mystique; and no one who has made the trek to distant Midwood to eat his handiwork has ever walked away less than awed.”

Pressed to prove my loyalty, I recently took the decisive step of actually buying an apartment near Di Fara, just so that I could go there without driving.  So imagine my surprise when, on a series of recent visits, the master served me up a series of badly burned square slices.  When I ate the first I was shocked and broken up. I had waited, as you always do, an unspeakably long time, watching the master go through his unhurried ritual while a dozen hypnotized people waited patiently. Part of the mystique of DiFara, of course, lies in the supplicant posture the customers freely choose; they all feel privileged to wait in the summer heat for the old man to get around to noticing them.  When he does, and they finally receive their long-awaited slice, the pain of waiting gives the pizza a special sweetness.  But to wait and then get a lousy slice!  It was both a disappointment and an act of irreligion, like seeing a guru getting a lapdance.

Was this, I reflected, just a misstep?  Dom is old; maybe this was the pizza equivalent of Alfred Eisenstadt’s image of the aged Toscannini famously faltering.  On the other hand, Dom seemed to know just what he was doing.  Using his asbestos hands, he would check on each square pie periodically, pulling the sizzling pan out of the oven and peeking at the crust.  Then he would put it back in.  I can only conclude that he wanted the crusts to be burned.  But why?  This remains a mystery on the order of Loch Ness. Meanwhile, I still keep coming back.  I made a point yesterday of driving all the way up to Patsy’s in East Harlem, the sole New York pizza temple which I hadn’t visited.  The coal oven slice there was enjoyable enough, but was otherwise undistinguished.  Tip sag extended half way up the slice, thus negating the advantage of the coal oven; and neither the cheese nor the crust was anything to write home to Midwood about.  It’s not just that none of the other New York places is as good as DiFara (Dom’s strange current burn problem aside); it’s that they’re not even in the same league.  Totonno’s is probably the best, but a totonno’s slice is still just pizza.  Often, it has occurred to me that, by combining world-class crust, san marzano tomato sauce, parmigiano reggiano, grande whole milk mozzarella, and mozzarella di bufala, and a liberal dose of olive oil, that he has created something better than pizza – a new and majestic dish on the face of the world.