Wonder and the Manahan

 

We’d just about exhausted all the pizza places around here.  There is one in downtown, New Paltz, right on Main St. that claims to have “Gourmet Pizza.”  There is a not so enticing sign swinging out over it.  Over in Highland when you drive through the town there is an obligatory place we always pass.  Thoughts turn to an old Mojo review I’d read of a live Jimi Hendrix album which essentially said: “Not Jimi’s best night.  Songs uninspired, multiple tuning issues.  For completists only!”   Maybe we’d be surprised.

 

Yesterday, before walking along the old canal in High Falls we noticed a pizza place in that town that I hadn’t seen before.  8:30AM neither of us were thinking about pizza.  But the two breakfast places in town weren’t open yet and we took a look over at Ollie’s Pizza.  A big open area, there on the opposite corner I don’t think I’d noticed it before. 

Later that afternoon as our pizza Friday routine loomed I talked everyone into heading back over to High Falls for dinner to try this Ollie’s  It’s not appropriate I suppose to call things “post-Covid” but it  felt that way, sitting out in their gravel patch in the late summer sun, waiting for a table with all people coming and going beneath the trees and the sounds of Stevie Wonder and the Manahan Street Band, which made me want to listen to that album badly. 

Apparently, they’d only just opened a few months back.  I was considering the courage it took to open something up just now after such a terrible period for restaurants.  They had a kombucha drink of some sort, that was working for me, even though the bottle was small, and my wife was happy with her wine.  We had one and then another service-oriented young lady show us to our table, clear the table and then take our order.  There were a pair of young girls at the next table who had the run of the place, and they were pretending to be waitresses. This seemed to naturally lead my wife and I to suggesting our little one ask or a job here.  But she was not interested and didn’t want to be reminded that it was all very cute when she and her sister were that age.  The pizza was great.  Flat, chewy rectangular, neither the crust nor the sauce disappointed.  Glad then, that Ollie’s falls within our updated radius for consideration. 

 

 

Saturday, 6/12/21