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Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Tour Gives a Big Slice (Or Square)of the Bourogh
by Alex Littlefield
Fuhgeddaboud Manhattan, Says Pizza Guru Muia
BROOKLYN — A tour debuting in Brooklyn today has everyone’s stomachs rumbling. “A Slice of Brooklyn,” the brainchild of Bensonhurst native Tony Muia, will treat sightseers to four and a half hours of local history, movie trivia, and — best of all — pizza.
On Friday, Muia led a group of 20 friends, family members, and reporters through a final test run of the tour before it opens for the public today. After assembling at Union Square, the group clambered onboard a small bus, which ferried them over the Manhattan Bridge and onto the shores of Kings County.
“It’s a 22-seat bus, with one monitor with DVD capability,” explains Muia. “It’s an audio-visual historical tour of the borough as well [as a pizza tour]. We have musical and video clips, which we use when we pass by historical points of interest. On the bus I can actually show [video] clips, and say, ‘Hey, this is where Saturday Night Fever was filmed, right in front of this pizzeria.’”
Among the other sites which Muia points out along the way are a Bay Ridge garage used in the filming of Goodfellas, a stretch of DUMBO streets from the movies Scent of a Woman and Once Upon a Time in America, the Brooklyn Army Terminal from which Elvis shipped off to Germany in 1958, and the Verrazano Bridge park where George Washington’s army fought part of The Battle of Brooklyn in 1776. “I’ve been an avid traveler for years, and whenever I went abroad, I met people who showed me around,” Muia recalls. “If they came to New York, I’d reciprocate.
“It started out as a tour of landmarks,” he continues, “but as a total pizza fiend, I’d take people around to pizzerias, combining the pizza stops with the Brooklyn tour. And after 19 years in healthcare, I was basically burnt out, so I sat down and said, what else do I know how to do?
“There aren’t many tours where people can take a bus around the borough,” adds Muia. “Most are walking tours.”
The tour features stops at two of Brooklyn’s best pizzerias, Grimaldi’s in the Fulton Landing area and L & B Spumoni Gardens in Bensonhurst. Patrons chow down on the eclectic mix of pizzas as part of the experience.
“We’re covering one end of the pizza spectrum to the other, from Neapolitan to Sicilian,” says Muia. Among the media personalities in attendance at the trial run was Adam Kuban, editor of sliceny.com, a blog dedicated to cataloguing the peaks and troughs of the New York City pizza scene.
Borough President and admitted pizza fan Marty Markowitz met the tour at L & B Spumoni Gardens to hand out Brooklyn pins to the tour-goers and congratulate Muia on his innovative enterprise.
“This is a great idea,” said Markowitz. “It showcases our fine cuisine[which] everybody tries to imitate, but they can’t. That’s true of Coney Island, and it’s true of L & B.”
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As featured on the Today Show, the Food Network, the Travel Channel, the Rachael Ray Show, Martha Stewart Living
and in the pages of Travel & Leisure, the London Times, the New York Times, Frommers and the Lonely Planet Guide!
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