Coal-fired pizza ovens, of which there are a handful in New York City, get even hotter than wood-fired ovens. The pizza is done in about 90 seconds.

Always great to hear from you, Cass.

I've been told there is a coal-fired pizza oven at restaurant in the Minneapolis area, built by a transplanted New Yorker, but I haven't found specifics on the name of the restaurant.

I've also heard that permits for new coal-fired pizza ovens in NYC have been routinely denied for many years, and most if not all of the coal-fired ovens in NYC were built before the 1940's. (This is a tangent, but the Poilane family opened a bakery in London a few years ago and had to get a special permit to build wood-fired ovens like the ones they use at their bakeries in Paris, because London fire codes don't permit large wood-fired ovens.)

I ate in a hotel restaurant in Dallas a few years ago where the menu bragged about the 1100 degree gas-fired appliance (I think they called an oven) they used to cook steaks. I thought their steaks were mediocre, and their pizza was even worse, though I don't think they used the 1100 degree heat on them.

In Dan Jurafsky's book, The Language of Food, he talks about words that appear in menus and how that relates to both the quality and price of the food. If the menu describes something as luscious or tasty, that's a key descriptor of a lower quality restaurant, because a really good restaurant doesn't need to tell you their food is tasty.

I think the same logic may apply to menus that go into detail about their technique.

So true.