Tony Muia, owner/operator of ”A Slice of Brooklyn Pizza Tour”, appears as one of the judges on the above episode of the Food Network’s Food Detectives. In the clip above, judges Tony Muia, comedian Mario Cantone, Joey Ciolli of Grimaldi’s and John LaFemina (the chef from Apizz in Manhattan), try to pick out the best pizza. The catch was each pizza would be made with tap water from a selected city, Chicago, NYC, and Los Angeles. Potentially a career ending taste test for some of these judges, each judge picked the same pizza as being the best. The winner? The one made with NYC municipal water. We can already imagine the emails from people in LA or Chicago, and we understand, but the taste test is over. We’ll be eating a prize slice later tonight.

Relatedly, Tony Muia will be giving a Brooklyn Neighborhood Tour on May 17. You’ll visit unique and historic neighborhoods not covered in our other tours. This bus jaunt through the city’s largest borough includes an audio-visual historical tour of Brooklyn’s famous movie locations, landmarks and points of interests. After your tour in Brooklyn you might want to make a pit stop at Sam’s pizza, argued by many to be the best pizza in New York City. But you’d do good to read up on the place first, maybe looking over reviews online, lest you make any newbie mistakes such as the tale relayed in this review on Yelp:

Apparently if you order the pizza by phone you can’t eat it in the restaurant!  Unbelievable!  We ordered our pizza by phone because we had guests in town and realized the restaurant could have quite a wait (not because it is packed but because it’s not run efficiently, nor is it adequately staffed). When we arrived Sam told us that we had to take our pizza to go and order another pizza to stay because he doesn’t do phone orders for sit down customers. “You can’t outsmart me.”

We decided to leave because he was being rude and I told him he could have been a little more flexible in his policy.  He told me that being flexible is not the Brooklyn way. He also called me a “piece of garbage” in front of all the other customer. He yelled us out the door and told a homeless guy outside the door that he was going to shoot him. 

If you don’t want drama at dinnertime, avoid this place. Nonetheless, the pizza is very good.

The pizza is very good, and the owner is very nice. Just play your part and he’ll play his. Trust us, it’s a blast.