Finger Lakes Adventure, Part 2

While we approached Rochester from the hiking trip south of Canandaigua, I couldn’t help but thinking of the Nine’s restaurant in Ithaca, NY. The two people I was with had other plans for the afternoon, so I texted my housemate and planted an idea. Within minutes he replied, we were going to Ithaca for pizza at Nine’s.

We were on the road by 3:30PM; the first song on the radio was Stairway to Heaven, and we all immediately thought of Jeroen Offerman’s wonderful backwards performance of the song on the McSweeney’s Wholphin DVD. A good omen. The sun was low in the sky; by the time we got to the fields on RT 89, it was prime for photographs:

So the pizza, if you have never been to Ithaca, then you won’t know what would posses a group of three students to drive an hour and a half for pizza. But if you have been to Ithaca, then you know that it is a research center, and its main area of expertise is pizza. Even before you arrive in the city limits of Ithaca you pass numerous mom and pop pizza shops. On this trip, we passed many individuals walking gingerly along the road with pizza boxes in hand and eager smiles on their faces.

Nine’s is a rare establishment, in that they have a variety of bar food, sandwiches, burgers, yet maintain an assortment of pizza toppings and delicious traditional and deep-dish pizza crusts. Our nutty waitress that I quickly became enamored with made this visit even more spectacular. She was making off the cuff comments that only one so smitten would find hilarious. Sigh.

We wouldn’t have travelled all the way without a bounty. The ride home was saturated with the aroma of the four pizzas we had in tow.

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