Putting Wylie Dufresne’s Stretch Pizza in Context

And why his pizzeria is actually groundbreaking

Wylie Dufresne’s al pastor pizza.

The prolific Wylie Dufresne is once again collaborating with Breads Bakery’s Gadi Peleg, having opened a permanent location of Stretch Pizza a couple of years ago, just east of Madison Square, at 331 Park Avenue South. It’s a cheery place, with a bar along one side terminating in a window that looks into the kitchen, and opposite that, orange booths with rails running on top that give the place the aura of a pizzeria from the 1960s. I decided to pay a visit with a friend to see what Dufresne is doing now, and how it compares with his efforts during the preceding two decades.

In October 2006, I published a feature story in Gourmet that was one of the first in a national magazine to describe the activities of what were then known as science chefs or molecular gastronomists, including Grant Achatz and Homaro Cantu in Chicago, Katsuya Fukushima, and José Andrés in Washington, DC, and New York’s own Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 on the Lower East Side. There, he was wowing diners with his oysters pounded paper-thin, cut into squares, and sprinkled with dehydrated kalamata olives and micro-diced green apples.