The Fed

Koronets: One Hip Joint, One Huge Slice of Pizza

Dining in Morningside Heights has never been cheaper or greasier. Prepare your palette.

Charlie Homans

Consumption has always been at the heart of the human experience, be it sexual, culinary, spiritual, or otherwise.  On a particularly magical evening at a fine eating establishment, the three can be figuratively intermingled in a dazzling, orgiastic display of pure, delicious eroticism.  This is the kind of intense experience that is intrinsic to the consumption, or conzumcione as my learned Italian predecessors would have said, of he myriad range of delights prepared –no, birthed, with the loving care of a Baroque masterpiece–by the maestros at Koronet’s Pizza.

The genius behinds Koronet’s sumptuous array of neo-post-revival-Italian cuisine is hinted at even in the establishment’s name: Koronet’s, a charming colloquial derivation of the Classical term.  The nombre conjures up stirring images of a long-past aristocracy, rendered in a romantically faded black and white photograph (French in origin, of course), evoked in a delightfully and quintessentially American post-modern-realist-humanist manner.  However, the title, not to mention the subtle, brilliantly minimalist-colonial-art nouveau décor in which old world brick walls effortlessly mingle with self-knowingly retro mirrored panels, cannot begin to prepare the cultured palette for the orgasmic expanses of robust flavor awaiting the discerning customer.

The exquisite feast (although feast is too base a word to do justice to the uncategorizable, celestial delights sealed away in every heavenly morsel) begins and endds with the piece de resistance, the cheese pizza.  Wagnerian in scope as well as the all-encompassing range of emotions found within its tri-corner form, the pizza stretches grandiosely in front of the patron with the knowing swagger of the innkeeper in Victor Hugo’s "Les Miserables."  Also called to mind is the descriptions of infinite Buddha-fields described in the texts of the ancient Indo-Europeans; indeed, the pizza seems to be orating for a vast, rapt audience of Boddhisattvas, saying "I am the beginning, the end, the eternity."  Chromatically, it is a delightful pastiché of yellow and orange hues, intermingling with the carefree spirit of a Bruegel subject.

But the appearance is only a prelude to the indescribable delight experienced when contact is made between the gastronomical senses and the quivering, luminescent form of the cuisine.  A rush of flavors hit the tongue simultaneously; the palette is both assaulted by the bombast of Bartók and caresseed by the delicacy of Debussy.  The abstract blending of tomáte and cheese calls to mind Rothko, Bernini, and Lorca, to name but a few.  Upon completion of the meal, the greasy remnants on the laughingly tongue-in-cheek paper plate upon which the pizza is borne seem to cry out, "It is a shame that this evening had to end so soon, mon amí."

Koronet’s also offers a wide array of painstakingly chosen beverages to enjoy, a chaotic intermingling that maintains a certain degree of whimsy in its jovial juxtaposition of Snapple and Budweiser.  I recommend the Pepsi, a unique and otherworldly drink that is the perfect complement, the ying to the yang, Raphael’s "Disputa" to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, to the singular main course.

Koronet’s is not just an Italian restaurant; it is an event unto itself.  Consumption is rarely elevated to such a level of artistry.
April 1, 2000