Harry’s Bishop’s Corner, West Hartford

Harry’s Bishop’s Corner
cuisine: New Haven-style Pizza
pizzas: $9.25 – $23
address: 732 North Main Street, West Hartford
phone: (860) 236-0400
credit cards: All major

4 1/2 Stars… Special

When Harry’s Met Sally’s: A Paean to New Haven-Style Pizza

One of the best relationship movies ever made was When Harry Met Sally, which featured Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in the title roles. In that movie, Harry betrayed all men by revealing the stark truth: Men and women can’t be friends. Oh, they can be friendly, they can even act like friends, but when you get down to it, the men are invariably looking for, well, what men invariably look for—S*E*X. But what about unattractive women friends, wondered Sally (who was anything but)? “No, you pretty much want to nail them too,” Harry revealed. The fact is that most friendships between men and women are altered by the electricity of sexual attraction, which means they’re not pure friendships such as can be enjoyed between members of the same gender but a slightly disturbing hybrid.

Of course, that film was so late 1980s! By the early 1990s, this truth was so readily acknowledged that the term “booty call” had entered the vernacular, and by the mid 1990s, the phrase “friend with benefits” followed hot on its (rounded) heels. And incredibly, it was just as likely to be female fingers doing the walking—anyone could reach out and touch someone. Clearly, I grew up in the wrong era (the supposedly libertine 1970s), never once receiving such a summons. But the routine introduction of sex into friendship didn’t eliminate complications like differing expectations, entangled feelings, pregnancy and the like.

Relationships are tough enough, but the ending of a relationship is especially fraught with peril. Until a relationship ends, two people are tethered to one another by common geography, overlapping goals, shared time, revealed emotions, and above all, by the joined effort to preserve the relationship. But when a relationship becomes unmoored, all bets are off. And what will become of all that was shared? How will things be divided? Well, these are the questions with which lawyers, courts and mediators wrestle. Fortunately, we weren’t subjected to a disillusioning sequel: When Harry Quit Sally. That would have been so French. But as we shall see, real life is quite a bit messier than most Hollywood movies.

When I review a restaurant, I may give some sense of where it ranks among like restaurants, but I normally avoid direct comparison with its competitors. In the case of Harry’s Bishop’s Corner, I made an exception because I couldn’t meaningfully review it without addressing public confusion with Harry’s Pizza Napoletana, also located in West Hartford. A few Hartford County residents may know the full story behind these two competing eateries, but most Nutmeggers do not. I’m going to take people through my investigation sequentially, so they can experienced its highs and lows just as I did.

As a New Havener, I live at the center of the pizza universe and can barely hear the whispers of outside challengers, especially in far-flung locales like Italy or Brooklyn. For years, it has been all about the “Big Three”—Pepe’s, Sally’s and Modern. Internationally, Pepe’s (into which I lump Frank Pepe’s The Spot and the Frank Pepe Pizzerias in New Haven, Fairfield, Manchester, and soon, Mohegan Sun Casino and Yonkers, New York) is the most renowned and considered top dog, while among New Haveners, the majority favorite seems to change from year to year. Growing up, some of my friends preferred Pepe’s and I dined there many times, but we were a Sally’s family, my parents closely guarding the “private phone number” that meant they might evade the lines and hassles that most folk endure.

Originally, Elm City residents just recognized the “Big Two” on Wooster Street, but long lines swelled with out-of-towners drove many locals away from New Haven’s Little Italy to Modern Apizza on State Street, where the pizza turned out to be pretty close to the same level, and eventually, shifting loyalties turned the competition into a Big Three. (Now Modern often sports long lines as well, although they probably include fewer out-of-towners.) I frequently ordered carry-out pizza from Modern, but Bimonte’s Pizza Castle in nearby Hamden (now Eli’s Brick Oven Pizza) would also do in a pinch.

New Haven’s Big Three did have their challengers. On Wooster Street, Abate also made a great pie, and for some reason, it held up better as it cooled than any of the Big Three’s pies. Before the Internal Revenue Service reportedly closed it, Palm Beach Pizza on Grand Avenue had its rabid supporters. Later, Bru Rm at Bar gained enthusiasts who argued its pizza rated with the Big Three, although they might have been unduly influenced by its plentiful coeds and homebrewed beer.

Occasionally, outside names would cross my consciousness. Zuppardi’s in West Haven. Alforno in Old Saybrook. Roseland in Derby. Born In America in Branford. And increasingly in the last few years, Harry’s in West Hartford. Except that I had always associated Harry’s with Hartford, not the ’burbs.
Then more recently, I started to realize that there were two Harry’s, even if the Connecticut edition of the Zagat Survey listed only one. As far as I knew, they were probably associated with each other. When my publisher informed me that our website had been sent a generous gift certificate by Harry’s Bishop’s Corner and issued a challenge to review the New Haven-style pizzeria, I embarked on a little research.

I was able to glean from the Internet that the two Harry’s were not affiliated with each other, and that the Harry’s located at West Hartford Center, which opened about 1990, was in fact owned by namesake Harry Rufleth’s ex-wife, Barbara Lang, having been won during their divorce proceedings in 1997 or so. So I pictured the situation as a former-husband-and-wife rivalry being waged in close quarters. That turned out to be wrong.

Regardless of the combatants, I couldn’t conduct my review in a vacuum. Challenged to review Harry’s Bishop’s Corner, I had to know—in my own mind, at the very least—how it stood up not only against New Haven’s Big Three but also against its former incarnation. The shared name, the history, the confusion and the head-to-head rivalry all compelled me to take a comparative approach. Someone needed to step in and clear matters up definitively.

So in the name of research, I first visited Harry’s Pizza Napoletana located on Farmington Avenue on my own dime. It was a pleasant Sunday summer evening, and I found the joint about half empty. (Or was the joint half full?) Humph, I may have grunted, envisioning long lines out the door of Sally’s and Pepe’s even in inclement weather. Maybe the pizza would turn out to be on a par with New Haven’s, but the customers clearly weren’t. Would pizza taste quite as good, I wondered, if there weren’t envious people congregating outside waiting for one’s table?

What else was missing? I took inventory. There was no Little Italy neighborhood outside, no tricolor flags flapping from markets, pastry shops, pizzerias and fine-dining establishments. There was no raucous, blue-collar Italian ambiance, either. Good lord, the joint even served breakfast, I noted, unthinkable in New Haven’s monuments to pizza-and-nothing-but-pizza. Easy tiger, I checked myself, one can’t hold it against the joint that it does more than one expects. Or can one? But the most glaring thing missing was a brick pizza oven. A former New Havener, my mother had a brick pizza oven built inside her Maine cottage. If she could manage a brick pizza oven, I wondered, why on earth couldn’t they?

There was also no edge, no vibe. What was missing most of all, and maybe it was a good thing, was the New Haven attitude. I remembered the scolding I received at Sally’s—never mind that I knew Sally (Salvatore) Consiglio’s wife, Flo—when I had lived out of state for several years and had forgotten how far I could advance as the head of the queue. It proved no defense that the warning sign was positioned far from the site of my offense. I had committed a sin graver than putting one’s toes over the white line at Customs, fouler than asking for ketchup at Louis’ Lunch, the New Haven birthplace of the hamburger sandwich.

Harry’s Pizza Napoletana also featured some pizza combinations at which Wooster Streeters would turn up their mostly Mediterranean noses. A Hawaiian pizza? A barbecued chicken pizza? A fajita pizza? (I reminded myself how suspiciously the uninitiated out-of-towner might look upon a white clam pizza.) Somehow, when one added it all up, what was missing was the gravitas of the New Haven pizza institutions.

Okay, one can’t eat gravitas. And no matter how painful it might sometimes be, I always approach restaurant criticism with an open mind. One positive at Harry’s Pizza Napoletana was that it offered a genuinely good salad. The salads I remembered from the Big Three were pretty under-whelming. And despite my pizza-and-nothing-but-pizza orientation, I had turned lactose-intolerant with middle age and now found it helpful to eat plenty of vinegary salad (as well as popping Lactaids) when I binged on pizza. And in my eyes there’s only binging—the pizza parlor is no place for moderation or restraint.

When our large pizza arrived, it looked pretty good. It was thin crusted, it had a bubbly, blistered crust, even a little cornmeal on the bottom of the pie. Frankly, we were psyched. We had ordered half of the pizza white clam with just a dusting of Mozzarella, the other half red with sausage and mushroom. But a few bites in, our elation began to wear off. It just wasn’t the near-perfect pie we thought it might be. There was no wow factor.

The crust was thin, but it was too stiff and cracker-like. Perhaps it was too thin and cooked too hard? Perhaps the dough should have been elastic? Perhaps more olive oil should have been used to soften it? We weren’t sure. But one can’t hold a long slice of New Haven-style pizza by its heel without its point dangling straight down and the ingredients falling off it. A slice of New Haven-style pizza requires support. One can’t eat it with one hand. Some New Haveners even roll it up (which I don’t endorse). By comparison, this crust had rigor mortis.

Even more important, there just wasn’t much clam flavor. The clams were finely minced and, for all we could tell, they could have been canned. And on the red side of the pie, there wasn’t enough sauce even to evaluate it. We weren’t enamored of the sliced sausage either, preferring the intensely fennel-flavored bulk sausage used by Modern. We were forced to conclude that the pie looked much better than it tasted.

There were some highlights, however. We liked the vinegary house salad, and judging by the fact that the joint sells bottles of it for $6.50, we’re not alone. We also applauded the housemade lemon sorbet offered at the end of the meal as a palate cleanser. Of course, I’d rather amble down to Libby’s Italian Pastry Shop, as visitors to New Haven’s Wooster Street are apt to do, but in the absence of Libby’s, it was a nice gesture.

I thought of some of the lesser New Haven-style pizzerias in my area (which I shan’t name) that can’t quite put together the whole package. I frequently observe that, if one can’t absolutely nail a New Haven-style pizza, which is no easy matter, one’s better off making just about any other style of pizza. The near misses just don’t work that well—only perfection will suffice. Our pie was so uninspired that I wondered if it had been cooked by Sunday second-stringers. Perhaps I should return during prime time, I considered. But I quickly scotched that notion, reminding myself that there are no off-nights at the Big Three. Their pizzas never vary.

We left Harry’s Pizza Napoletana crestfallen. We had no reason to believe that Harry’s Bishop’s Corner would turn out any better than the older Harry’s. We had lost a precious night in the week-long Taste of Hartford, and now we glumly faced the prospect of losing a second night doing the actual review during which we could have visited Feng Asian Bistro, Costa del Sol, Max Downtown, Carbone’s or some other Hartford heavyweight. Let’s head straight over to Harry’s Bishop’s Corner, I proposed. We’ll still be on our own dime. If the pie’s no better, I’ll tell my boss I can’t review it, and we won’t have sacrificed another night of the Taste of Hartford.

Five minutes later, we eased into a parking space outside Harry’s. The mall location and bright yellow neon signage didn’t suggest world-class pizza, but as I said, I always keep an open mind. Upon entering, we noticed that the joint didn’t serve breakfast. Pizza and nothing but pizza. Not, as Jerry Seinfeld would say, that there’s anything wrong with serving breakfast.

Although brighter and nicer, the interior reminded us of the layout of New Haven’s bastions of pizza. We felt more at home. We again ordered a split pie, one half white clam and one half red with bacon and caramelized onion. Our attractive waitress, Asya, warned us that the white side would cook drier, exhibiting a level of alertness and sophistication we hadn’t encountered at the original Harry’s. Go ahead and divide our pie in half, we decided, and cook each half according to its need. Optimism began to swell in our chests.

While we waited for our pizzas, I checked out the ovens. They were the same metal behemoths used at the older Harry’s. Keep an open mind, I reminded myself. I asked Asya who owned the pizzeria. Harry was long gone, we learned, retired to Hawaii. I pictured him sipping piña coladas underneath a coconut palm. A hut and a honey, I call it. That’s one way to get the last laugh. Harry’s Bishop’s Corner was currently owned by Kevin and Anne Plaut, who had been with Harry off and on since 1992 as his manager.

Later, I got Kevin to fill in the remaining blanks. A genial fellow, he called the saga As The Pizza Turns. Harry apparently operated a pizza cart in front of the Capitol in the late 1980s. (Don’t ask me how a pizza cart works.) Then Harry opened a proper pizzeria on Capitol Avenue, which obviously accounts for my Hartford association with the name. About 1990, Harry’s moved to West Hartford Center. I’m not sure when the oft-married Harry and Barbara hooked up, but by 1997 they had divorced, the pizzeria winding up in Barbara’s hands. Not long after, Harry opened a new pizzeria in Avon. In 2002, he moved his pizzeria to Bishop’s Corner, and in September, 2007, Kevin and Anne bought him out. Clear as stout beer, right?

Soon our pizza arrived, the halves nicely realigned to form a seamless whole. Both sides were cooked perfectly. The white clam side of the pie glistened with olive oil. The whole belly baby clams were intact and applied much more thickly than at the older Harry’s. While the crust wasn’t quite as good as the Big Three’s, it was darned close. It wasn’t cracker-like and it had some flexibility. Like the original Harry’s, it was coated in cornmeal. When we picked up a long slice of pizza, it drooped as it should.

And when we bit into our pie, it just burst with flavor. Suddenly, it was as if the two of us hadn’t eaten almost an entire large pizza just an hour before. Our deadened taste buds reawakened from their coma. Apparently, a great pizza could be produced without benefit of a brick pizza oven. We were in pain by the end, but our taste buds were so over-stimulated that we didn’t leave a scrap of pizza behind. We finished, as we had at the other Harry’s, with a palate-cleansing lemon sorbet.

I brought up the restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally where Sally demonstrates to Harry how utterly convincingly a woman can fake orgasm, leading to the famous line delivered by an older female diner: “I’ll have what she’s having.” “If Sally had been eating here, she might not have been faking,” my friend observed dryly.

Now I understood why our website had been approached with a gift certificate and a challenge to review the pizzeria. It must have been driving Harry’s successor crazy that the like-named pizzeria was garnering the accolades when his seemed significantly better. How, I wondered, had the other joint scored so high in the Zagat Survey? Local bias without adequate exposure to New Haven’s Big Three? Name recognition? Or was it carry-over from when the original Harry’s might once have been better? Of course, I would never know the answers to such questions, but I no longer minded sacrificing a night of the Taste of Hartford. Now I was preoccupied with a taste of West Hartford.

Gift certificate in hand, I returned two nights later with fellow New Haven-style pizza connoisseurs. I was in decidedly better spirits than the previous time I had approached Harry’s Bishop’s Corner. My companions’ excitement was palpable, because I had told them that this was a pizzeria that could compete in the New Haven market. I wasn’t worried that I had raised my companions’ expectations. I knew Harry’s was up to the challenge.

The pizzeria was full, and we were fortunate to snag a table without too long a wait. Our dining party was impressed that Harry’s had a fairly extensive wine list for a pizzeria, and that most of the bottles were priced $10 with a few priced $15 or $17. I maintain that Americans restaurants miss the boat by placing outrageous markups on wines compared to their European counterparts. Soon we were enjoying a bottle of 2006 Il Poggio Sangiovese Rubicone, Italy ($15).

Harry’s Bishop’s Corner offered four salads to the other Harry’s one, including a similar house salad with sundried tomato-balsamic vinaigrette, bottles of which also were for sale. We liked the Caesar salad graced with a zesty eggless dressing, croutons and Asiago cheese. We enjoyed a baby field greens salad with sliced pear, Gorgonzola and candied walnut in a traditional balsamic vinaigrette even more. One won’t find salads like these at The Big Three. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But we were here for the pizza. We weren’t rescuing Maid Marian, saving Private Ryan, disabling the guns of Navaronne or destroying the bridge on the River Kwai. We were on a narrowly focused mission to evaluate the New Haven-style pies. So I ordered three pizzas, two-and-a-half of which were white. Even though I had already assessed the white clam, I couldn’t deny my friends the pleasure of trying their favorite pizza, so we requested a large pie that was half white clam and half La Rosa (red with Italian sausage, roasted red pepper, ricotta cheese and fresh basil). We ordered a small summer special of sliced fresh tomato, fresh basil and Parmesan on Harry’s special wheat crust. And finally, we decided to try a large spicy shrimp special.

The white clam was, of course, wonderful, the La Rosa not especially my style but good. The summer special was terrific, and I could see myself using the wheat crust to add interest whenever ordering a vegetarian pie at Harry’s. But the nicest surprise of all might have been the spicy shrimp special, which was a white pie with shrimp, caramelized onion, bacon, fresh parsley and arrabiata sauce (roasted tomato with crushed red pepper). The contrasts generated between the snappy shrimp, the salty bacon, the sweet onion and the spicy sauce were exhilarating. I’m guessing that even when this special isn’t being offered, one could assemble it from Harry’s list of optional pizza ingredients.

My New Haven friends came to the same conclusion I had—that the New Haven-style pies at Harry’s Bishop’s Corner outclassed virtually all challengers and ranked just barely outside the Big Three. While it might not make sense for a New Havener to make the trek except for comparison purposes, my friends noted how often they find themselves in the Greater Hartford area and how tempting the siren call of this Harry’s would be.

As fullness finally got the better of us, we chuckled at the thought of a blind pizza tasting. Like the historic Judgment of Paris blind wine tasting in 1976 that brought the California wine industry to the global forefront, we pictured such an event held in Wooster Square, with opinionated veteran judges going cuckoo trying to figure out the provenance of Harry’s unlabelled entries. I could picture them saying to themselves, well the crust isn’t quite as burnt as Pepe’s, the pie’s not quite as oily as Modern, the tomato sauce is a touch sweeter than Sally’s, and so on. The bottom line is Harry’s approaches the The Big Three, and is probably in my opinion the fourth best pizzeria in the state (and therefore the world).

For proper perspective, I decided that I had to pay a visit to Connecticut’s top-rated pizzeria. According to the latest Zagat Survey, Frank Pepe’s The Spot pulled down a 27/30, while the several Frank Pepe’s Pizzerias lumped together received a 26/30, as did Sally’s and Modern. I hadn’t eaten pizza on Wooster Street in several years. I had to make sure that the New Haven myth wasn’t growing larger in my mind without the testing of reality.

Amazingly, I found a parking place right in front of Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria, where a long line had formed. Because the space was very tight (and the crowd had little else to do), I received more guidance wedging my aging Acura Integra into it than a Boeing 747 taxiing to the gate. Surprisingly, at Frank Pepe’s The Spot, which is set further back from Wooster Street, we found a much shorter line. Being the only twosome, we got a table almost immediately.
Our matronly waitress made fun of her restaurant’s higher rating, observing that the ovens and the pizzas are exactly the same at all Pepe’s restaurants. Of course, I could think of one thing that was different—the clienteles. Perhaps, I privately hypothesized, the Fairfield and Manchester locations brought down the numerical average of Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria, not necessarily because their pizzas were any less great but because they were likely to encounter more naysayers not accustomed to this type of pizza. New Haven-style pizza is an acquired taste. Once you acquire it, nothing else will sate the craving for it. But I remembered moving here from Oregon at age 11, and initially finding the pizza too burnt, too oily, too intensely flavored, too too.

And it is intense. As memorable as Harry’s pizza was, it still didn’t quite reach the ideal achieved by Frank Pepe’s The Spot. Although Harry’s metal ovens could produce first-rate pies, they didn’t quite duplicate that characteristic burnt taste. Before I left Frank Pepe’s The Spot, I checked out my face in the bathroom mirror and washed away little charred black flakes on my skin.

At The Spot, we requested a small white pie featuring fresh tomato, fresh basil and Parmesan that couldn’t have been lovelier. We also ordered a large pie that was half red with sausage and mushroom , half white clam with garlic. The cubes of fresh tomato were vibrant the way they can only be at the optimal point in the summer. The sausage wasn’t the bulk type we preferred from Modern, but at least it was sliced thickly enough so one could taste the fennel. But the white clam was so concentratedly clammy that it blew our minds. There can’t be anything better on the planet. But it’s so intense that I think I would have a novitiate get used to the idea by trying someone else’s white clam pie first. Then with a white clam pie or two under his belt, let him graduate to Pepe’s.

Nothing about my visit to Frank Pepe’s The Spot diminished my respect for Harry’s Bishop’s Corner, however. Kudos to Kevin and Anne. It takes big onions to challenge The Big Three, especially with a critic that grew up in the New Haven area, and Harry’s mounted a most credible challenge. Someone not raised on New Haven-style pizza might even like it better. Like The Big Three, Harry’s is a good enough pie to be worth a drive from anywhere in the state, or even beyond. It’s a destination pizzeria.