Brooklyn is located in Kings County, New York, and Kings County Pizza is located in North Miami Beach. The small slice of a restaurant is owned by a couple with roots in Queens and Long Island, but the pizza is touted as "Brooklyn's Finest." I'm not sure I'd go that far, but Kings' certainly serves the finest Brooklyn-style slice in Miami. And that's pretty damn good.
I ask one of the owners, who also makes and bakes the pies, if it's the water. He laughs. "No. You just have to know what you're doing." He's got lots of pizza-making experience from his days in New Yawk. The crust on the Neopolitan slice is thin, but not paper-thin like you get at those prim boutique pizza emporiums. The rim of the crust boasts blackened bubbles from intense oven heat, the red sauce is sweet and well-seasoned, the ratio of melted mozzarella on top is perfect -- just like they do it in da best borough. A slice is $2.25, a medium pie is $9.95, and a large goes for $12.95. The latter two prices are lower than what mediocre pizza joints around town charge.
Kings County is one of the few places locally to serve Sicilian square pies, the type with soft, puffy, foccaccia-like dough. It is surely the only place to proffer a "Grandma," which is a thin-crusted version of a Sicilian. Each pie goes for $15.95 per; you cannot get these by the slice.
I sampled a meatball parmesan hero (what many people outside of Brooklyn inexplicably refer to as a "sub"). The small spheres are lightened with bread and tastefully spiced, heated in a crusty sub roll with red sauce and melted mozzarella on top. The sandwich is $6.95, but for two dollars more you can choose ziti or spaghetti as a side dish and call it dinner. Same goes for the chicken parm and eggplant parm heroes. Manicotti, lasagna, and baked ziti are other entrees; I might eventually try the last offering, if only to stop The Chowfather from nagging me to do so.
Calzone, stromboli, mozzarella sticks and garlic knots also dot the menu. Maybe next time. A couple of salads are on the menu too, but Brooklyn natives don't eat no Caesar salad in a pizza joint. No Caprese, either. It's just a slice, a Coke, and back out on the streets of Flatbush. Got it?
If you should order dessert at a pizza place, rumors are likely to start about whether or not your parents are from Brooklyn -- or if you were even raised by parents -- or rumors much worse than that. On the other hand, Kings County tempts with homemade tiramisu for just $4.95.
Kings County was getting set to open up a new dining room in the same strip mall, a few storefronts away. The space was being worked on and in disarray, so I only snapped a crummy photo of one wall. Still, it will be nice to be able to sit in a pretty space to eat. Next month, the pizza place will have been open for a year-and-a-half.
"New York Tested, New York Approved," is the motto at Kings County Pizza. As we Brooklynites like to say, Fuckin' A!
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