NOBODY’S BUYING SAUSAGE PIZZA ANYMORE IN NEWYORK CITY?

The owner of the Carmine Street spot, a favorite of Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, discusses sausage pizza the way a musician might talk about that neighborhood’s folk singers — as a relic of times past.

“It’s fallen off over the past 10, 15 years,” says Joe’s Pizza founder, Pine Pozzuoli. 

“Thirty years ago, I would order 30 to 40 pounds of sausage a week. Now, I order very little. Two or three pounds”, he said.

When asked why he thinks the topping fell out of favor, even as its cousin, the pepperoni slice, remains popular, this old-school pizzaiolo can only shrug and guess.
“I wish I knew,” he says. “Sausage is more fat. Many people don’t eat fat anymore.”
It could also be a matter of taste. Long Island native Jamie Roberts was a sausage-slice regular, long attracted to its salty and savory qualities. 

• But these days, the inconsistency of pizzeria sausage has caused the ingredient’s removal from her personal-favorites list.
• “I haven’t found a place lately where I like the sausage they use,” says the Whitestone-based music publicist. “Some places use that crumbly, fake kind of sausage. I like when it’s circular — when you cut it.”
• Scott Weiner runs Scott’s Pizza Tours, which he says takes people on “historical, cultural and culinary explorations through the New York pizza scene.”

Weiner, like Pozzuoli, places the beginning of the end for sausage love in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and says it can’t be attributed to any one cause. But a more cosmopolitan ­palate has something to do with it.
“People are not requesting it as much,” he says. “Chicken, pineapple slices, jalapeños, all these other toppings are becoming more popular, so [the pizzerias are] phasing sausage out. Arugula is more popular now, so you’re seeing arugula even on slices,” says Weiner.
He also notes that with the massive changes that have enveloped New York over the past few decades, sausage has even lost the cache of tradition.

Source: NY Post