I don't know why I do this to myself. For some reason, whenever I'm in an airport, I feel strangely compelled to try the pizza offerings. I'm almost always disappointed. That's because the fare is, at worst, a Pizza Hut Express or at best some sort of mediocre "New York style" joint with limp pies sitting below heat lamps.
The pizza at JFK International's AeroNuova, though, is a a notch or three above standard preflight fare.
That's not to say it's great pizza. The crust is flat and a bit pale but has adequate flavor. It is not aggressively bland, as some pies of this style can be, but neither is there much incentive to finish your "pizza bones." The sauce is not particularly complex. Salt is the dominant flavor (as it is the red-sauce pasta dish that my wife tried). But the mozzarella is good, creamy, and stringy. For NYC, it's B-list pizza, maybe B-minus‐list. In pizza-deprived regions, it might rate A-list. It falls into the category of what I'd term "good for the neighborhood."
But you know what? At $12.50 for a Margherita pie that's made to order (and not "made to order" from a frozen puck in a microwave-convection oven), it's much better than it has a right to be.
The service at AeroNuova (and the cluster of "high-end" Terminal 5 food options) is another thing. I've been a number of times on outbound flights and have always left frustrated. The people are friendly but they're a little inattentive—problematic in a place where most customers are under tight time constraints.
If you have time to kill and want to avoid fast food options but not spend a fortune, AeroNuova pizza hits the mark.
Related...
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Joey's Pizza, Terminal C, LaGuardia »
About the author: Adam Kuban is the founder of Slice. You can follow him as @akuban on Twitter.