Pizzas at Il Leone.
Photo: James Lynch
If you went looking for the Maine of New York City, you might find your way to Park Slope: both bougie escape hatches, quiet and a little uncool, with bountiful access to nature and some truly unbelievable public parks. So it has a kind of bashert sense that when a New Yorker turned Mainer turned pizza chef — Ben Wexler-Waite of Peaks Island, an island community of roughly 1,000 full-time residents — returned to the city to hang a shingle, he found his way to Seventh Avenue, 11215.
New York is a pizza town in a way that Portland, Maine, is not, but a recent visit to Il Leone — “The Lion” — confirmed that Wexler-Waite is acquitting himself admirably even in this more competitive market, and without the added advantages of Casco Bay scenery. (He’ll return to Maine in the summers and keep Il Leone going up there, too.) The narrow space that last housed Bar Vinazo has been softened a bit with hanging platters, but the room maintains its twilight illumination, filled early with what appeared to be more friend groups and double dates than single ones, and emptied, Park Slopeishly, by ten to 11.
A few local adjustments have been made for the move. In Maine, Il Leone’s pies are cooked over wood, whereas here an electric Italforni oven does the work. But the crusts are still naturally fermented sourdough, and some ingredients are being imported from the Pine Tree State, for better or worse. The traditional Margherita, one of Il Leone’s short list of pies, is made with San Marzano tomatoes, but the house-special Margherita del Leone is made with greenhouse-grown Maine cherry tomatoes — usually. “They’re back-ordered right now,” our server admitted, dropping off a hot platter. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “But these might be even better.”
With no disrespect to Maine agriculture, I can’t imagine missing them, not when the Brooklyn cherry tomato sauce — milled daily and uncooked until it goes into the pizza oven, making for a rosier, tangier sauce — is as bright and fresh as it is. Wexler-Waite’s pizzas lean toward the wet side, with a more judicious application of cheese, and the upshot is that you can eat the better part of two or three without feeling quite as overloaded as you might otherwise. Plan to order at least one pie per person, as the menu doesn’t at this point encompass much else: an appetizer of fried artichokes, some cheese, an arugula salad, and a bowlful of soft, tennis-ball-size meatballs are about it. Of those, I wouldn’t skip the meatballs.
What does feel irreplaceably Maine is the Isola (“island”) pizza with Maine’s favorite ingredient: lobster. The inspiration was apparently lobster fra diavola, and there’s not much more on Wexler-Waite’s stretchy crust than chile-flecked tomato sauce and a truly impressive quantity of claw. The menu lists the pie as the dreaded “MP,” and the night we visited, it rang up at $48, a splurge to be sure, but for more lobster than I’ve sometimes had out at twice that price. “Oh, this is naughty,” a dinner companion of mine said when the Isola was dropped off after our Margherita del Leone and a mushroom pie. My only word of warning would be to get your own pincers ready: I didn’t miss the cheese except that, without it, the lobster meat slid around my slice with total abandon.
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