Can there be any topping this tour?

It makes stops for Brooklyn's best-loved pies

November 13, 2005|George Oxford Miller, Globe Correspondent

NEW YORK -- Our tour bus slowly cruises down 86th Street while the opening credits for the 1977 movie ''Saturday Night Fever" roll on the video monitor. The crowded sidewalks and storefronts outside seem to merge with the scene on the monitor as a very young John Travolta walks down the same busy street.

Travolta stops at Lenny's Pizza for two slices just as we drive past the pizzeria. We could be in a time warp -- or on a movie set. Then Travolta turns into Shirt World and reality returns. The corner storefront is now a McDonald's.

Clips of movies filmed in the borough are among the condiments on our Slice of Brooklyn Pizza Tour.

''We're going to sample pizza and see Brooklyn from one side to another," Tony Muia promises when we board the bus at Union Square in Manhattan. Our group of 10 hails from New Jersey, Ohio, Florida, Boston, and the Bronx.

We cross over the Manhattan Bridge with views down the East River to the Brooklyn Bridge. Muia cues the bus CD player and Frank Sinatra sings ''The Brooklyn Bridge" from the 1947 movie ''It Happened in Brooklyn."

The song and view of the historic bridge set the stage perfectly for our half-day, insider's tour of the state's largest borough after Manhattan. Even though it is home to world-famous Coney Island, the New York Aquarium, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and 526-acre Prospect Park, Brooklyn hardly registers in the minds of tourists, or for that matter, Manhattan residents, as an interesting destination. Muia wants to change that.

A respiratory therapist, Muia, 41, quit health care in March to launch his tour business. As a second-generation Italian, he often travels back to his homeland.

''I like to ask locals where to eat," he says. ''I make a lot of friends that way and invite them to visit me. Some have, and I take them around Brooklyn. I realized that no tours really show the Brooklyn I grew up in and love. So I took the two things I know best -- Brooklyn and pizza -- and came up with the tour."

Once in Brooklyn, we cruise through DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), a warehouse-now-condo neighborhood. Muia plays scenes from ''Scent of a Woman" and ''Coming to America" as we pass corners and views featured in the movies.

We drive to the Old Fulton Street docks below the Brooklyn Bridge for one of the best views of the Manhattan skyline, and then head to Grimaldi's Pizzeria, rated best in New York by Zagat six years in a row. A small mom-and-pop storefront, Grimaldi's serves Neapolitan-style pizza cooked in a coal-fired, brick oven at 600 degrees. The family has been making pizza since 1941 and has been on Old Fulton Street since 1990.