A couple of days ago a friend forwarded me a Yelp newsletter about Tribeca (click to enlarge). From what I can tell, it’s an edition of Yelp’s weekly New York newsletter that happens to be devoted to Tribeca. I read the first paragraph (“Right next to De Niro, but we’ll be hood forever… While Jay-Z has yet to show at a UYE [Unofficial Yelp Event], yelpers are content to explore this concrete jungle below Canal Street where dreams are made. Whether you’re lurking between lofts, indulging in omakase, doing a little shopping or rubbing shoulders with J.T. during Happy Hour, Yelp’s got your gem-filled guide to Tribeca.”), sighed, and figured I’d come back to it when I had the fortitude.

I prefer my advice from people I know, or at least from people whose taste I can discern; if I’m going to take advice from a stranger, I’d sooner walk into a shop that has nice stuff and ask someone working there instead of relying on Geraldine K. or Chris H. It’s nothing personal—and that’s the problem. For all I know, Geraldine K. is a robot, or from Teaneck. It’s not user-generated content that bugs me—I work for TripAdvisor, which is all about user-generated content. But with travel, you don’t have a lot of options, and so the advice of strangers gets much more valuable. But Yelp has always struck me as too broad, as if everyone on the subway was telling me where to eat.

And so I was a little dismayed that the advice in the newsletter isn’t terrible. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s not way off. The “gem-filled guide” to “The Triangle Below Canal,” however, had a significantly higher amount of crap in it (“I’ve lived in new york for 8 years and I’ve been to TriBeCa twice,” and “the Odeon is still IT. the bar is a fantastic hang. bring your poodle.”), proving, if nothing else, that editors will always have a role in separating the wheat from the chaff.

As I scrolled down, I noticed a comment from Bartholomew K., “Saluggi’s has pretty good pizza, too.” I didn’t even know what Salugggi’s is, so I Googled it—and, of course, up came a listing on Yelp. Salugggi’s is that newish (I think) pizza place on the east side of Church, between Canal and Lispenard. Dave R. called it the best pizza in his life and said the mozzarella is made in house. Varun B. didn’t quite rave, but was positive overall. Irene Y. thought it’s good but not all that. And then Bartholomew K. weighed in, this time with a long review:

“Crazy that this place is around the corner from me (and I know how we’re all used to saying ‘around the corner’ when the place is 10 mins away) but this really and literally is around the corner from me! Yet I never went there! So my dear friend and neighbor came over today —we worked on a bottle of red. I fed us the gorgeously delicious white borscht that I made this morning (also known as Zurek in Poland) but we got hungry. Again. So since the wind chill is Syberia crazy and that’s exactly where Natalia was born (dear friend and neighbor mentioned earlier) we so were not walking far. Around the corner (literally) it was. The place is really nice. I was expecting a counter with displayed pizzas, you order a slice, they pop it in the oven to reheat, you grab it, you go. No, no, no. There are BOOTHS! You sit down, a sweet waitress comes over, we order a bottle of great Italian read (MSRP $21), an order of garlic bread with cheese (delicious), and a small pizza that we customize with tomatoes, pepperoni and jalapenos. Everything was delicious.”

He had me at the start—I, too, thought Saluggi’s was a by-the-slice joint. And I was intrigued by the sit-down factor and the wine, but unsure about the jalapeños (not on my pizza, you don’t).

But then Dave H. said he got “7 medium wings” and I thought maybe Saluggi’s isn’t my kind of pizza place (which is to say, one that takes pizza seriously); moreover, he’s from Falls Church, Va. Shawn A., from Astoria, said, “You know you’re eating well, if the conversation turns into a discussion of whether or not the pizza you’re chowing on is better than Lombardi’s or not.” And that’s when I closed the window—not because Shawn A. doesn’t know how to deploy a comma, or uses the phrase “chowing on,” but because Lombardi’s isn’t any good. End of discussion. I had wasted too much time reading about a place that, if I’m really curious, I should just pop in and look around—I trust my own instincts far more. I’m intrigued by Saluggi’s and I’ll probably give it a try.