Now Open: Le Midi

Over on East 12th St., it was Piola, the Brazilian pizza place, and now it’s Ribalta, the Italian pizza place. And it’s a pizza school, too. UrbanDaddy writes:

There are book smarts.

There are street smarts.

And then there are pizza smarts.

Today, we’re going to focus on that last one.

Also, we’re going to eat a bunch of pizza pies.

So let’s enroll at Ribalta, the only pizzeria in New York with three different types of ovens and its own university (but alas, no football team), now open.

Bottom line, this restaurant is really quite absurdly serious about pizza. The dough: imported from an Italian mill and aged 48 hours before baking (we’ll let you imagine what this does to a crust). The tomatoes: all San Marzano and all hand-crushed. The ovens: plentiful, varied and powerful.

Yes, these master pizzaiolos/fusspots felt it was necessary to install three different ovens in the place. Brick. Wood-burning. And stainless-steel convection. Reason #1: to bake your sausage-and-sage pie precisely the way God intended. Reason #2: the syllabus required it.

See, when this place is not standing in as the prototypical Friday night date spot, it’s doubling as the city’s first Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli—an esteemed pizza school that’s been around in Italy since the ’80s. So eventually you’ll be able to register here for classes, seminars and lectures on the science of the slice.

Assuming you scored high enough on the pizza SATs.

Tacos on 12th St., strangely enough in the same location that used to house The Big Enchilada. What’s old is new again.

The New York Post reports this robbery just one block away:

A woman who left her Union Square apartment to check in on a 102-year-old neighbor returned to find a well-dressed burglar grabbing $50,000 worth of her jewelry, cops said yesterday.

The thief — decked out in a black suit and tie — had sneaked into an apartment building on University Place at 3 p.m. Monday and was prowling around for an unlocked door when he hit the jackpot at Linda Kaplan’s home, sources said.

As the thief was stashing bling in a canvas bag, Kaplan, 76, walked in.

She demanded to know what he was doing, and he responded, “I’m with the Fire Department,” according to cops.

When Kaplan demanded to see ID, the 6-foot-2 bandit threw her down.

“He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me to the ground,” Kaplan said. “I grabbed his legs. I tried to stop him from leaving.

“Once he knocked me down, I started screaming for help.”

Among those who ran to her aid was a painter working in an apartment upstairs. Minutes earlier, the thief had poked his head in that unit but fled when he saw the worker.

Cops said the bandit operated like an “office creeper,” a well-dressed thief who looks for laptop computers or purses at unoccupied office desks.

All businesses in the Bowlmor building with the exception of the pita place have now closed. Demolition (plus two years of construction) now seems imminent.

Now, of course, it is apartments, but it was built as the home of Fairchild Publishing.

The Girl Scout troop serving girls in the city’s homeless shelters that captivated New Yorkers last year will be selling cookies again in Union Square this week.

Troop 6000 will hold its cookie sale at Kellogg’s NYC Cafe, where members had their successful inaugural sale last year. Long lines quickly formed as news spread about the troop, and the girls ended up selling 36,000 boxes.
This year, the troop has a goal of selling 60,000 boxes. The girls will be at the store from 1 to 6 p.m. on April 22 to April 26.

The troop started at a homeless shelter in Queens in 2017, but grew to include hundreds of girls at 15 shelters across the five boroughs, the city announced last year. The troop is led by women and mothers also living in homeless shelters and holds meetings every week at the participating shelters.