Vayikra: 2:1

The Divine Pizza Dishes It Out: An Imaginary Restaurant Review

Special to The Jewish Link

Lou Feingold’s life is dominated by pizzas. He is not only the owner of the most popular pizza store in Teaneck, The Divine Pizza, he also spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about pizza. I paid a visit to The Divine Pizza in Teaneck last week to find out what makes it so special.

Every other pizza emporium in Teaneck offers other products as well: cannolis, bourekas, falafels, even sushi. Lou only makes pizza, and he has dedicated his life to perfecting his recipe. Perhaps that is why The Divine Pizza is the only strictly kosher pizzeria in America to receive the Zagat Survey’s highest rating (in fact, it is the only strictly kosher pizza joint rated by Zagat at all).

Lou got his start in San Francisco in the 1930s. “I became a strict vegetarian while attending college at Berkeley,” he told this reporter. “I even did some experimentation with macrobiotics with some of my dorm buddies.”

Once, while on a bad wheat germ trip, Lou had a vision of a giant flying pizza hovering over his bed. He decided that his vision was a message from God and started wandering the Bay Area going from pizza parlor to pizza parlor searching for something—what, he wasn’t sure.

At that time, Lou knew nothing about keeping kosher. He went to every famous San Francisco pizza parlor and tried a slice. He visited Goat Hill Pizza, Za Pizza, Arinell Pizza, Little Star Pizza, even Zante’s Pizza and Indian Cuisine. All the slices he tried were delicious, but none helped him fulfill his spiritual quest. Feeling a bit dejected, he boarded a crosstown bus to start his trip back to Berkeley. Out the window he spied a store marquee that read The Flying Pizza. Lou couldn’t believe his eyes. This had to be it.

“The store was a dive,” Lou said. “There were only three tables in the place, and two of them had wobbly legs. I sat at the third table and ordered a slice. By professional pizzeria standards, it wasn’t very tasty. It had thin crust, weak sauce and stringy cheese, but somehow it spoke to me. I approached the owner, Mel Rubinstein, and asked, ‘Why is this slice different from all other slices?’”

“‘Easy,’ Mel said. ‘It’s kosher.’”

That moment changed Lou’s life. He quit college and studied under Mel to learn the culinary art of kosher pizza making. He learned the different fat contents of kosher cheeses, the high-quality sauces that have hashgacha and the art of reheating a slice to perfection. Three days at The Flying Pizza, and Lou knew he had absorbed all that Mel could teach.

Lou then disappeared from the grid for a while, and during our interview he wouldn’t speak of that time period. Rumor has it he spent three years exploring the best kosher pizzerias in America, and finding religion. Lou became a pizza cult figure, and there were Lou Feingold sightings all over the country. Rumors placed him at many different pizza parlors, sometimes at the same time. There were reports from Eddie’s NY Kosher Pizza and Nagila Kosher Pizza in Los Angeles, to Tel Aviv Kosher Pizza in Chicago, Slice of Life in Skokie and Kinneret Pizza in Cleveland Heights, to Edge of the Woods in New Haven and Tov Pizza in Baltimore. A website sprang up dedicated to Lou sightings (where’slouf.com), and everyone wanted a slice of him, so to speak.

In New York, Lou had been sighted at Amnon’s, Pizza Time and Benny’s in Brooklyn, Pizza Professor in Queens, Jerusalem 2 and Café Viva in Manhattan, Hunki’s in Oceanside and Shalom Chai Pizza on the Lower East Side, all in one week.

Wherever he had been all that time, Lou Feingold emerged in Teaneck in 2003, sporting a yarmulke, a wife, two children and a lease to the pizzeria formerly known as the Kosher Inn. The rest is history. “The Divine Pizza is not just an eatery, it is a destination,” this newspaper wrote in 2010.

It is hard to describe what makes a slice from The Divine Pizza so special. Is it the mozzarella cheese Lou imports from a small kosher cheese manufacturer in California? Is it the sauce made from San Marzano tomatoes? Could it be the brick oven he designed to his own specifications? Whatever it is, Lou Feingold’s pizza is, quite frankly, divine. The crust is light and airy, the sauce is zesty, and the cheese seems, for lack of a better term, treif.

During our interview I cornered Lou and asked him, flat out, what makes his pizza so special. I assured him that whatever he said was off the record.

“It’s quite simple,” Lou said. “I modeled my pizza after the Korban Mincha as it is described in Parshat Vayikra.”

“The what?” I asked, not well versed in the Bible.

“The Korban Mincha,” Lou said. “The meal offering in the Tabernacle. It was a sacrifice to God made from flour, olive oil and livona, or frankincense.

“I thought all the sacrifices were animals,” I said.

“Not quite. There were special occasions, like the Omer offering on Passover and the loaves of bread used in the Tabernacle on Shavuot, that were sacrifices made from grain. But I was much more interested in the mincha offerings that were given by individuals.”

“How so?” I asked. This was the longest conversation I had ever had with Lou Feingold in all the years I had been frequenting his restaurant and I wanted to keep him talking.

“Poor people who couldn’t afford an animal would present the flour offerings instead. It was all they could manage financially, but just because their sacrifices were less expensive didn’t mean these worshipers were less sincere or less dedicated. This is the only sacrifice in the parsha that describes the supplicator as a “nefesh,” as a soul. These flour offerings came from the heart.

“That’s how I make my pizza,” Lou continued. “It is my vegetarian offering to God. But since there are no sacrifices today, when I take it out of my brick oven, you get to eat it. It’s that simple.”

“Fascinating,” I observed. So you use flour and olive oil, just like in the Korban Mincha.”

“Exactly.”

“And the frankincense?”

“The original allegedly came from the resin of a Boswellia tree. That’s kind of hard to come by in New Jersey. Let’s just say we use a secret ingredient.”

“Fair enough,” I demurred.

By Larry Stiefel

 Larry Stiefel is a pediatrician at Tenafly Pediatrics.