Domino’s In Brooklyn? Fuhgeddaboudit

You needed the Dining Section to tell you that Domino’s new “Brooklyn Style Pizza” tastes like dookie? Apparently:

At Totonno’s in Coney Island, pizza has been made the same way since 1924. Along with its Brooklyn pizza brethren Di Fara’s, Grimaldi’s and Franny’s, Totonno’s is considered among the best in the country by people who have dedicated their lives to the subject.

We purchased our Domino’s pie just a few blocks away from Totonno’s on Neptune Avenue. That it was handed to us over bulletproof glass turned out to be the most authentically Brooklyn part about it.

Domino’s, which began selling Brooklyn Style pies at its 5,100 United States stores last week, designed the pizza to mimic what most New Yorkers get when they go for a slice. The crust is stretched thinner than that of a standard Domino’s pizza, and the cornmeal cooked into the crust gives it certain crispness. The pieces of pepperoni and wads of sausage the company suggests as toppings are freakishly large.

The slices are so big you can fold them, which, it seems, is the Brooklyn-y part.

. . .

Domino’s uses its standard sauce and a blend of mozzarella and provolone on the Brooklyn Style Pizza. At most slice stores in Brooklyn, you won’t find cornmeal on the crust, and the cheese is usually a blend of shredded part skim and whole milk mozzarella. The typical sauce is usually not as sweet as Domino’s, but it doesn’t compare with Totonno’s.

Brooklyn boosters seem to have a thin skin* about Domino’s new pizza, resorting to trotting out old tropes about the company:

As part of the marketing of [Brooklyn pizza eating] culture, Domino’s has started a couple of contests. One is a drawing for a vintage New York taxi, even though everyone knows it’s almost impossible to hail a cab in Brooklyn.

The rest of the marketing blitz rests on television ads and on a Web site, www.brooklynstylepizza.com, which features characters purchased at the Brooklyn Stereotype Store.

An older Italian woman yells out of a brownstone window. A man with the look of an extra from “The Sopranos” pumps iron on the roof. A Rosie O’Donnell lookalike berates a taxi driver for not folding his slice like a man. And there’s an African-American guy. You can’t hear what he’s saying because the rap music pouring from his car speakers is too loud.

That kind of imagery just grinds at Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president.

“It’s a multinational right-wing company, mass marketing the Brooklyn attitude with obsolete ethnic stereotypes, not to mention flimsy crusts,” he said through a spokesman.

*In this respect, Brooklynites still lag behind Staten Islanders, who are still upset about their recent MTV exposure.

A Lazy Day At The After-School Special Scriptwriting Boiler Room

And just like that, my latest after-school special script dawned on me:

Students and parents at a Brooklyn high school where a teen was removed from class for dressing as Adolf Hitler on Halloween marched in protest of the costume yesterday — and were joined by the teen.

Walter Petryk, 16, and his parents strolled with about 50 people from the Leon M. Goldstein HS community to the nearby Holocaust Memorial Park.

“They called it a walk of tolerance and respect, so I figured I would go and show my tolerance and respect for other people’s views of my costume,” Petryk said.

Backstory: What, That’s Not Funny? and So I Guess That’s Not Really Funny After All.

The New Knitting

I don’t know — sounds sorta self-consciously oddball to me:

A chic bar in Park Slope hosted a master class on how to mount dead animals.

Taxidermy, of course, is an activity more commonly associated with union halls upstate than with Union Hall, the bar on Union Street.

But at 5:30 pm last Saturday night, Scott Bibus, a member of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists, sat down at a long table in the pub’s trendy basement, for once church-like in its silence.

Bibus put his scalpel to the breast of a white-feathered chicken, and sliced it down the middle, all the way to its “vent,” an industry euphemism for anus.

Then he took his latex-gloved finger and inserted it into the carcass to begin separating its delicate skin from the “inner anatomy.”

. . .

Afterwards, there was the inevitable taxidermy contest, an experience that was, arguably, even more other-worldly than the master class.

Brooklynites converged on the makeshift stage with every manner of preserved animal body.

The competing specimens included a mounted chicken skeleton called Genus Nicoleais Richias, the testicles of a dog named Merlot preserved in a jar of rubbing alcohol, an Indonesian “tringaling,” and a naturally mummified rat.

But the top prizes went to a pair of squirrel testicles mounted on a plaque, a pigeon specimen, and two gaffes — a Fiji mermaid and a Coney Island “searabbit.”

The Botox Theory Of Urban Revitalization

Affluent whites set their sights on Fulton Mall:

Fulton Mall is a commercial heavyweight, according to its merchants association. It draws 100,000 shoppers each day, rings up more than $100 million in annual sales and commands rents of up to $250 a square foot, among the highest of any retail district in the city.

But few of its customers are from the nearby brownstone neighborhoods.

“The challenge the Fulton Mall has is a lack of retail diversity,” said Joseph Chan, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, the leader in the effort to renovate the mall. “There are certainly a lot of cellphone stores and shoe stores, for example. But in terms of retail that cuts across a broad socioeconomic spectrum, there’s not a lot right now.”

The first order of business for Mr. Chan is a makeover of the streetscape — streamlining sign clutter, installing new bus shelters — to which the city has committed $9.5 million. As for new stores, Mr. Chan said, the choice will largely be driven by the many newcomers.

“Basically,” he said, “you’re adding thousands of people who are going to need a quart of milk at 10 at night.” Local brokers say the new residents will also need a wine store, a specialty supermarket, new restaurants, dry cleaners and perhaps another bookstore.

“There are no good restaurants, there’s no midrange apparel or accessories,” said Faith Hope Consolo, an executive with Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate, which handles many of the store rentals in the downtown developments.

“What we’re aiming for is a better neighborhood all around,” Ms. Consolo said. “That doesn’t mean Gucci, but maybe HMV, maybe Zara, maybe Equinox. We’re addressing chain restaurants like Cheesecake Factory and Legal Sea Foods. We’re not asking anybody to leave the street. We just have to bring in new stores in a way that everybody can work together. We’re Botoxing Fulton Street Mall.”

Oh My God, An Old Rock!

Fort Greene residents are protective of their rocks:

Residents of Fort Greene don’t want a 400-million-year-old boulder that was dug up during a sewer upgrade project 10 days ago to be lost to their neighborhood.

Even so, the city yesterday used a flatbed truck to move the 10-ton stone to a new Queens park.

“It belongs to us,” said Nicco Beretta, 32, who lives on the Vanderbilt block where the stone was discovered. “They pulled it out of our street.”

The unusual rock was the first, and biggest, of four giant boulders uncovered on the block between Myrtle and Park Aves.

Its removal has turned into a stone of contention in Fort Greene.

“The big one, the first one, should stay here where they found it,” said an emphatic Joseph Vollaro, 55, a 16-year resident of the block.

The other rocks were discovered this week and pulled out of the ground by contractors working for the Department of Environmental Protection.

One is destined for Fort Greene Park. The two smallest ones are going to Pugsley Creek Park in the Bronx, Parks Department officials said.

One woman said all the rocks should stay in Brooklyn.

“What are we, chopped liver?” asked Louise Barlow, 75, who lives five blocks from where the rocks were unearthed. “They should stay in their own hometown.”

(Just so we’re clear, the oldest known rock dates back about four billion years.)