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It seems like my life is full of New Yorkers. I love them, but as we all know, the common thread that binds people from New York City is their adamant, unshakable belief that NYC is innately superior to all other points on the map. That’s fine. Home town pride is natural. I still have a deep fondness for my home towns of Flint, MI and Lubbock, TX… even though I really shouldn’t.

The one area that New York pride really grinds on my nerves, though, is when it comes to pizza. New York-style pizza is, in my opinion, just shy of inedible, with their platonic ideal consisting of plasticky cheese and a miniscule hint of sauce scraped haphazardly across a thin, cardboard-like crust. I have eaten New York-style pizza in New York from New York pizzerias that have been canonized by New Yorkers, and that pizza was unremarkable at best, awful at worst. It’s even worse when certain unnamed people at 1UP insist on buying San Francisco-made attempts at NYC-style pizza for staff meetings and parties. Bad as New York-style pizza is, true disaster strikes when people who aren’t currently living in New York City try to mimic it.

Frankly, the whole thing put me off pizza for a few years. I’d convinced myself that I just don’t like pizza altogether… until one night last summer, when I walked past a local pizzeria called Irving Pizza and bought a slice on a whim. It was fantastic, and it reminded me that I don’t hate pizza — I just hate the oppressive fascism of New York pizza adherents.

Custom margherita slice from Irving Pizza.

Irving Pizza, so named because it is located on Irving Street, made me love pizza again.

The crust is thicker than New York pizza, yet it’s thinner than the Chicago tradition demands. It’s soft but not doughy, and the crust edges are reminiscent of a good ciabatta; tender and spongy inside, but crisp and brown outside.

The sauce is rich and well-seasoned. It’s not applied too heavily, but it still has enough of a presence that you can actually taste it, unlike the faint intaglio of red you see on New York pizza. I’m not entire sure what the cheese blend consists of, but it’s definitely more than just mozzarella. It’s melty and always perfectly browned, and thick enough to make you feel like you’re actually eating something substantial without giving you what Cat refers to as “cheese belly.”

The best part about Irving Pizza, however, is their lunch deal. Four bucks gets you a huge slice of pizza and a gigantic drink. (They no longer advertise the special on their menu, probably because it’s such a good deal.) Their afternoon slice selection is pretty poor — usually just cheese, pepperoni, combo, and Hawaiian — but there’s a secret. If you ask them to add a couple of toppings to a slice of cheese, they’ll send it back to the kitchen and have it tricked out to your custom specs. They accomplish this by dropping on whatever toppings you ask for, sprinkling on a bit more cheese, and running the thing through their oven again to reheat it and seal the toppings with the added cheese.

The margherita shown above is the fruit of this particular cheat; as you can see, they don’t scrimp on the toppings when you ask for a custom slice. They covered the thing with huge, fresh slices of tomato and a ton of shredded basil. Actually, this slice is a bit more meagre than normal, since they usually include a lot more cheese on the top layer. So long as the added toppings don’t fall off en route to my mouth, though, I’m not too picky.

For my money, Irving Pizza is probably the best, most satisfying pizza I’ve ever eaten. It strikes a perfect balance between taste, texture, and substance. Of course, pizza’s a matter of taste, and since BakeSpite’s co-proprietor is rather ferociously from New York City… you can probably expect a rebuttal soon. But hey, if you’re ever in San Francisco, I recommend you try Irving Pizza to decide for yourself — it’s just a block south of Golden Gate Park, right at 19th Ave.

Man, now I want some pizza.

Death of me? Yes, as in: “This project is going to be.” Although I think it’s very likely that today’s entry represents the absolute nadir of this endeavor. From here, it can only get better.

Unlike the other Japanese Kit-Kat bars I’ve been writing about, there’s nothing particularly exotic about this one. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one exactly like it on sale in the U.S., but I’ve never really looked, and in any case it conceptual components are certainly widely available here. And I scrupulously avoid them! But here they are, combined in a single offensive package.

The villain of this piece? A Kit-Kat White Bar, aka a white chocolate Kit-Kat Chunky. It’s similar to the banana bar from a few days ago, except without even the promise of a slightly unusual flavor to spruce it up. It’s just… an oversized Kit-Kat covered in thick white chocolate. But it was donated to the Kit-Kat Densetsu cause by David Ellis the last time he went to Japan, and he contributed it in good faith! So I was determined to do my part and choke it down.

Photo tragically taken by Jeremy.

Crivvins! Look at that thing. You could kill someone by shoving it through their skull. It dwarfs the paper plate it was photographed on!

Needless to say, this was not good. At all. All the issues that beset the banana bar are present here — the chocolate shell is way too thick, and since it’s white chocolate, that means suffering through endless waxy mouthfuls of overly sweet cocoa solids and assorted sweeteners. The interior is totally decent, but it’s completely overwhelmed by the awful white chocolate-y-ness of the outer portions. I felt nauseous all yesterday afternoon, and I’m pretty sure I know where to point the finger of blame.

I actually don’t hate white chocolate as much as most people; it’s interesting in moderation. It’s delicious when it shares room and board with macadamia nuts in a cookie! But this is not moderation, it is a violation of human rights. I intend to file a complaint. Actually, I guess that’s what this post is.

Like I said, it’s all uphill from here, in a good way. But first, maybe I will write about something that’s not Kit-Kat for a while. I need a break, because this one broke me.

Today, a palate cleanser. After a harsh regimen of weird imported Kit-Kat flavors all built on a white chocolate base, I desperately needed something a little more normal. So I decided to crack open one of the flavors I’ve been saving for a rainy day: Whole Wheat.

Whole wheat flavor Kit-Kat. Photo by Jeremy.

OK, so I guess the premise of a whole wheat candy bar isn’t necessarily inherently appealing… in fact, it sounds a little odd, when you stop and think about it. But I’ve been banking on the hope that the “whole wheat” referred to the wafer inside the bar rather than some weird flavoring added to the chocolate exterior. Happily, I was right.

By and large, this was essentially just a normal Kit-Kat mini bar. A blind taste test would have left me thinking I’d just eaten a plain ol’ Kit-Kat, although I’d probably have walked away idly wondering when Kit-Kats got so darned good. The difference between this and your typical off-the-shelf bar is incredibly subtle, which is a welcome change of pace from all the bizarre colors and wackily intense flavors Japan usually churns out.

While I’m not entirely certain what makes a whole wheat wafer different from a normal wafer — what are they usually made of, anyway!? — from the end-user perspective, it’s definitely not as sweet. There’s a slightly nutty note to the flavor, and the texture is a bit… well, “grittier” sounds negative, but it’s slightly grainier and less crisp. But not in a bad way.

The change in the wafers has a similar effect to using dark chocolate: It cuts the sweetness just a bit. Given that candy bars tend to be a bit too sweet, that makes this one of the best Kit-Kats I’ve ever tried. Which, at this point, is saying quite a bit! I’d call it second-best, in fact… right after the amazing winter premium Kit-Kat I found in Inara in 2008, which had dark chocolate covering wafers with a black tea creme. Man, I’d kill for one of those… but in the meantime, whole wheat makes for a nice second-best.

Huh, another green Kit-Kat. Well, so be it. I wonder what “zunda” means…?

Hm. Oh. Oh. Oh, holy crap. It’s a doughy mochi dessert made with soybeans.

Japan, why you even got a do a thing?

Zunda Mochi Kit-Kat. Photo by Jeremy.

Needless to say, this was another Kit-Kat variant that I found myself approaching with sheer dread. I’m really not a big fan of Japan’s gooey foods, like this and monja-yaki. And, I gotta say, edamame and chocolate are not high on my list of “great tastes that taste great together.” Formula for disaster?

Yes! But fortunately — for a certain value of “fortunate” — this is one of those Kit-Kat bars that could only be described as “incredibly bland.” If my eyes were closed and I didn’t know it was supposed to taste like runny soybeans and rice, I’d think I’d been unfortunate enough to have been given a normal white chocolate Kit-Kat. There was maybe a tiny hint of vegetable-ness in the creme filling, I think… but then again, maybe I was just imagining things to rationalize the fact that I’d paid a buck-fifty to import a tiny candy bar that tastes like the sort of thing I wouldn’t normally eat for free if someone handed it to me.

Actually, that bit about my eyes being closed isn’t quite true, because this one smelled a lot different than a normal Kit-Kat. It took me a minute to place the odor, but it’s almost exactly like xôi (pronounced “soy”), which I confirmed with Cat in one of the goofiest conversations we’ve ever had:

Me: Hey, can you smell this?

Her: What is it this time?

Me: It’s supposed to taste like edamame, I guess.

Her: [look of revulsion]

Me: No, smell it. It smells like xôi, right?

Her: Well, edamame is soy, so that makes sense.

Me: No, like Vietnamese xôi. Sticky rice.

Her: [sniff] Oh, yeah, I guess it kind of does.

And that is all I have to say about that.

Every once in a while, these Japanese Kit-Kats surprise me. Sometimes it’s a terrible surprise, like when something that should have a savory soy sauce taste end up reeking of maple syrup. But occasionally, it’s a pleasant surprise. Such is the case with Kit-Kat Calpis flavor.

Photo by Jeremy

In case you’re not familiar with Calpis, it’s a yogurt drink that is sold in America under the name “Caplico.” This, one assumes, is because “Calpis” is distressingly close, phonetically speaking, to “cow piss.” Not really the association one wants attached to their beverage, yannow?

I wasn’t entirely certain what to expect from this one, but I didn’t have high hopes. I’m not too keen on yogurt drinks, and even worse this was yet another white chocolate variant of Kit-Kat. How could a white chocolate candy meant to taste like frothy yogurt possibly be delicious?

The answer: By totally not tasting like white chocolate or Calpis at all. Nope, this particular variant basically tastes like the candy bar version of a lemon poppyseed cookie. Is that rad, you may wonder? The answer is yes: It is rad. The flavor is largely concentrated in the wafer-n-creme portion of the bar, but there’s a faint hint of lemon to the chocolate as well. It’s a well-balanced mix, not overwhelming at all, and does a lot to redeem the entire concept of a white chocolate Kit-Kat.

I mean, I’m not gonna run out and marry this variant or anything, but it’s good!