Rather than make our trip to the New England Air Museum a single day event, my intrepid wife and I decided to make it a weekend adventure for the kids. Well, we used the whole “weekend adventure for the kids” thing as an excuse to make the trip two days so we could eat some of the greatest pizza known to mankind in New Haven, CT. An added bonus was that the kids were into this idea and baiting them with promises of an indoor hotel swimming pool quickly sealed the deal. 

As it seems our readership digs a good road trip story with photos, read below for an account of our trip to the wilds of Connecticut for pizza the day before the New England Air Museum.

There’s a fair amount of snow currently on the ground in the greater Boston area. For that reason we decided to hastily load the family up into our much maligned family truckster and hit the road for the far more luxurious and temperate climes of Connecticut. How much of the white junk is on the ground? Pushing two feet in many areas. We have a massive snow wall at the end of the driveway which has frozen into an icy fort for the kids and a parking chock block for Goliath.

Undaunted after learning that Connecticut’s climate was neither more luxurious nor more temperate than southern Massachsuetts, we loaded the address to Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria into our trusty GPS and set out.

Were we driving 151-miles for pizza? Technically no. We were just taking the long way to the hotel which happened to be located by Frank Pepe’s pizzeria. We thought admitting that pizza was the prime target of a 151-mile, one way drive, would make people naturally assume we weigh 500lbs each. 

Yeah, yeah we took highways and not some ancient horse path laid out by the people who predated the Native Americans, but frankly we were hauling a two and four year old with us and priming them for a five plus hour haul to another museum next month up in Maine. I do have to say that I enjoy driving on roads with big snow banks on the side. It makes the whole world seem like a race track, which sadly meant I was driving the slowest, worst handling, fatty fatty two by four of a race car ever made…our Chrysler Pacifica. Hear that sound? It was a single tear dropping from my cheek to the keyboard. Ohhhhh, snowy driving photos!

There aren’t many major points of cool to document on Route 95 heading from Massachusetts to Connecticut, but there is this, the huge bug on the roof of New England Pest Control in the Providence, Rhode Island area. After you pass this point, you’re pretty much dunzo with fun stuff. As an aside, my wife took the photos while I was driving. She doesn’t like taking photos and was essentially pointing the camera in the general direction of the subject and excitedly pressing the button like a Japanese tourist while yelling at me about how she couldn’t work the camera. The below bug photo was taken with the same level of precision Ray Charles would have used if he wasn’t dead and accompanied my family on this sojurn (which would have been nice, I’ll admit). Anyway, she nailed it!

Like on a crappy cooking show, we’re going to do the Voila! thing and tell you that we’re picking the story back up upon our arrival at Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria, the center of all that is good and right with the world. Located at 157 Wooster St., New Haven, CT it opened in 1925 and the pies are still cooked in the same coal fired (oh yes, I said COAL) oven that has been the deal since day one. Because we beat the lunch rush by about an hour (speeding? Me? SPEEDING?) we only had to wait a couple minutes to get in. Here’s why we love old school places like Frank Pepe’s that have refused to bend their ways for anyone. When we say wait to get in, we literally me in the restaurant. You stand on the curb. It was 10 degrees out. Someone thought one of my sons was an ice sculpture for a minute. 

In the summer there’s no place to park. Add snow, and you have a legit issue. Luckily, being from Boston and knowing how this stuff works, we slid a gentleman who appeared to be employed by, well, ok, he may have been self employed as some sort of parking space extortionist. Said extortionist procured us a fine spot adjacent to the pizzeria and promised to “keep an eye on it” for us. I told my wife to take a long last look at the family truckster. My four year old thought I was serious and started crying. When I explained to him that I didn’t really think that the nice man was going to steal our car, my wife reminded me that said man was directly behind me. Whoopsie doodle.   

There’s no putting your name in, no stupid buzzer thing, no having a drink at the bar. You stand there, and of course you do because this pizza is good enough that you’d chop block the old lady in front of you if she didn’t move up fast enough. Once inside the restaurant you go right back in time. Booths with numbers hammered into the paneling next to them line the walls. The stern lady at the door who just let you in barks a number at you and you hurry there for fear that screwing up means ejection and an automatic spot at the back of the line.

Let’s set the scene:

So, we’re in and consulting the menu. This is a no bullshit kind of place in case you haven’t figured that out already. Try to order a buffalo chicken pizza and someone’s probably getting their ass kicked. Worse? The person kicking your ass will be an older Italian woman who has been breaking knees working at Frank Pepe’s since the end of WWII. The true measure of a pizzeria is the basic cheese pizza. Plus with our two and four year old companions, toppings are normally the kiss of death so we ordered a large one of those along with a small cheese with the only topping being fresh garlic. Not romantic? You must be some kind of sicko or you forgot we were sharing a hotel room with the kids. We’re hoping it is the latter!

Oh, I forgot to mention beer, because we got that. One of the reasons my wife really likes to travel is because it allows her to drink like a fish relax and have a beer with her food. As I was about to order a beer a voice arose from the other side of the table, and by process of elimination, I discerned it was my wife’s. That voice ordered a pitcher of beer, citing the obvious economic advantages that come with buying in bulk. That’s why she handles the family books.  

This may appear to be a photo of my 2-year old son Jack, when in fact it was my expression when the pizza hit the table.

So out comes the pizza, which is cooked in the thermo-nuclear hot coal fired oven. Specifics are not given, but due to the fact that my glass of beer which was sitting next to the pizza began to boil when the pie hit the table, I’m guessing that the ovens run about 81,000 degrees. My wife whose senses may have been dulled by half a pitcher of beer in a short time dove right into a piece of pizza and incinerated her mouth. My son asked why mom was crying and chugging beer and I explained that the pizza was a little warm. (My wife claims to read this stuff, I’ll know for sure today!)

Here’s the monster coal fired oven!

Because we were consuming pizza like our horrific Pacifica consumes fuel, no photos of a whole pizza exist. These will have to do. (In case you are wondering, the beer was Sam Adams Winter Lager…good stuff!)

What makes this pizza so great? All the ingredients are real and fresh. The recipe is still the same exact one used by Frank Pepe 85 years ago when he opened the joint. The searing heat of the ovens allow the paper thin crust to have a great kind of charred crunchy-ness on the outside but a doughy chewy factor on the inside. If I could buy a loaf of bread made from the crust, I’d score a truckload. The garlic pizza we felt a little guilty about. Judging by the volume of garlic on the pie, we consumed the entire allotment for the state of CT that week. It was great, but damn, there was probably four or five cloves of garlic on a small pizza. I’d scarf it again in a heartbeat.

If I knew specifically what made the pizza so good, I wouldn’t tell for my own safety. Since this is a 85-year old business started by a man from the “old country”, slim chance exists that the owners/operators don’t belong to that horribly misunderstood fraternal order of Italian Americans whose nickname currently escapes me. Simple men, like a plumber named John Gotti were in this thing and got accused and sometimes punished for crimes that they vehemently claim to have no knowledge of.

I’m not saying anything….just sayin.

When you’ve gorged yourself on pizza, protocol is to get the eff out. Seriously, throw your stuff in a box, pay the bill, and exit the grounds so that the next poor bastard in line can get in from the cold. We did that, checked with the parking extortionist and exited stage left on the way to our hotel and the pool my water loving kids were dying to spend time in. Sunday would be for the museum and the trek home.  

I’ve been home for about eight hours as I write this and I’m already scheming on the next trip to Frank Pepe’s. Hell, even if the pizza sucked, the sheer joy of making the trip there is worth the price of admission.

I hope you enjoyed this trip to the pizza place. I know I did.

See the best supporting cast a guy who loves telling stories could ever have below. From left to right there’s Kerri, my wife (who was stone sober when I took this photo), two year old Jack, and four year old Tom.