Smudged, subliminal oil paintings and decadent pizza dough turn a depressing day right-side up

Ever have one of those days? You know what I’m talking about­—the kind where you miss the subway that gets you to work on time, it starts to downpour and you’ve left your umbrella at home, and, to top it all off, your books and phone fall into a disgusting street corner swamp. It’s the kind of day where nothing goes your way. For me, that was yesterday.

I’ll start by saying that I wanted to talk about the J. Cacciola gallery’s Koo Schadler exhibit, which utilized classic egg tempera Italian technique to paint modern subjects. I was excited—I love Italy, its language, its art, and especially its food. However, when I finally made it down to Chelsea’s art district, the building labeled the J. Cacciola gallery housed no such exhibit. The Koo Schadler exhibit that New York Magazine had promised would be up until Dec. 31st had moved.

I arrived at the current exhibit angry, annoyed, and unimpressed. The Linda Christensen exhibit at the J. Cacciola gallery, located at 617 W. 27th St., takes up one small room in a gallery that may or may not be under construction (I say may because the sawdust from the wooden floor’s newly sanded surface was irritating my eyes). The gallery consisted of muted Leroy Neiman-esque smeared oil paintings that exhibited no discernible features to interpret.

That was, until I stepped back and looked at the bigger picture. Up close, each part of the picture looks like a blurry mess—sloppy, oppressive, and irreconcilable. Christensen uses everything from paintbrushes to scraps of cardboard to mix textural styles to best depict the dynamism of human bodies in motion. ”Tiles,” my favorite of the series, focuses on a woman ready to clean the house, standing on a crate to reach a sink.

What at first seemed like a complete mess of a day—and of an exhibit—became infinitely clearer with a little perspective.

If not for the subliminal messages at the J. Cacciola gallery, a trip to Kesté Pizza and Vino at 271 Bleecker St. could brighten up even the darkest days. As a New Yorker, I’m confident that I’ve had enough pizza in my life to be able to decide what’s a good slice, like Di Fara’s in Brooklyn, and what’s downright disgusting, like Famiglia’s. With lines that wrap around the block, Kesté, which translates to “This is it” in Napoletana Italian, isn’t messing around. I do not hesitate to say that this is the best pizza in Manhattan.

I went with my brother, who had eaten at the restaurant almost 15 times in two weeks. Due to his undying loyalty to Roberto Caporuscio, the Napoletana pizza Don who makes every pie by hand with the freshest basil and mozzarella he can find, we were shown to the front of the line and served a free appetizer pie of asparagus pesto, tomatoes, mozzarella, and sausage. Its rich earthy flavors whetted my appetite.

Within five minutes of a Marinara pizza and a traditional Margherita pizza being placed on our table, both were gone. If not the best sauce, mozzarella, and basil in New York, Kesté boasts the best dough. It is at once gooey, fluffy, thick, and thin. It is thin enough that I did not feel glutted after the meal and recognized the perfect charred spots, but fluffy enough that each bite seemed like I had bitten into a small ball of dough that had been freshly kneaded but had not yet made it to an oven. No other pizzeria could serve me a slab of dough with marinara sauce, basil, and a few cloves of garlic and have me literally licking the plate, hoping to soak up another drop.

My childhood made me confident that Disney World was the happiest place on earth. But that was in the B.K. (Before Kesté) era. My standards are higher now. We were in and out in an hour, paid under $20, and treated our palates to a classic Italian taste that was so vividly perfect that I can still recall it. While perspective is always helpful when trying to see the forest from the trees, comfort food is probably the better answer.