New Hyde Park: Eddie’s Pizza
The "bar pie" is a specialty at Eddie's Pizza in New Hyde Park. Credit: Newsday / Erica Marcus
What a rocking, venerable, welcoming, efficient, well-priced haunt is Eddie’s Pizza. The NHP stalwart was founded by Eddie Fanelli, “a small-time prize fighter, somewhere in the late ’20s, early ’30s,” according to the current owner Joe DiVittorio. In the 70s, a fire forced “the little bar with a few tables” a couple of doors down the block. DiVittorio and his father Nicholas bought the place in the early ’80s and added the adjacent dining room at around the same time.
What hasn’t changed in all those years is the primacy of one menu item, the bar pie, an extremely thin, flat pizza with no discernible rim, whose tomato sauce and cheese are melded to the crust with the strength of Super Glue. Neither the crust nor the cheese nor the tomato have much character on their own, but on a recent visit I found the sum of their parts to be strangely addictive. So too were the meatballs I started with, none too tender but bathed in a tangy, pleasantly coarse tomato sauce.
Eddie’s is steeped in nostalgia. The decor appears to predate the current location, but the music seemed leftover from my own ’70s adolescence: Blue Swede (hint: ooga chaka, ooga ooga ooga chaka) and Gilbert O’Sullivan blared while I watched the staff busily serving patrons who all seemed to be regulars.
This summer Eddie’s inaugurated a mobile pizza truck whose Manhattan schedule can be viewed here. But the original Eddie’s Pizza can always be found at 2048 Hillside Ave., New Hyde Park, 516-354-9780.
The bar pie at Eddie's
