Slice
In Which I Find Margherita Pizzas Boring
A Margherita pie from Tutta Bella in Seattle, adequate but ultimately forgettable. [Photograph: Adam Kuban]
In Which I Summarize This Post
Run-of-the-mill Margherita pies suck. There are great ones, though. Unfortunately, they are few and far between. I now appreciate the addition of well-thought-out and interesting toppings more than ever.
In the Nostrana post I put up on Friday, I said I'd give you my thoughts on VPN pizza. As I wrote that, I had so much more I wanted to say about VPN pizzerias but didn't think stuffing it in the Nostrana entry was appropriate.
So I started to draft a whole blog entry about VPN pizzerias all blurring together. About how they provide a certain level of pizza goodness but never seem all that inspired. About how I had way better Neapolitan-style pizza at places that didn't strive for the VPN label. About how you really had to be on your game if you're taking pizza down to its essence (which I had defined as the pizza Margherita — crust, sauce, cheese).
But then as I reread what I had written, I realized that that's not true just at VPN pizzerias. That's the case for all pizzerias that go for the Neapolitan Margherita thing. If that's your aim, you really have to nail each bit of "the Holy Trinity" if you want to make an AMAZING pizza.
[Photograph: RBerteig on Flickr]
As I touched briefly on in the Nostrana post, if you're doing a Margherita pizza, you've kind of got the deck stacked against you from the beginning. Because, let's face it, fresh mozzarella isn't there so much for the flavor but to add some creaminess and substance to the pie. It's a mild, rather bland cheese, and if you're missing flavor in the crust or sauce, fresh mozzarella ain't gonna pitch in and add much.
So that leaves you with the crust and the sauce doing the heavy lifting.
But at a lot of places, when it comes to sauce, you've got pizza-makers doing little other than crushing some San Marzano tomatoes, adding some salt, and calling that a day. And, hey, you can't really fault that as a technique. Good San Marzano (or San Marzano–style) tomatoes, whether fresh or canned (and in the U.S., they're almost always coming from a can), aren't anything to sneeze at. The best sauces made this way will be redolent of fresh tomato, with just a little pleasant sweetness.
The pizza upskirt from Pizzeria Mozza, a place where the crust is flavorful, crisp, and chewy. [Photograph: Adam Kuban]
Maybe you can see what I'm getting at here. If you accept that the cheese is going to be mild-flavored (or, at worst, bland) and that the sauce will vary little from place to place, that leaves you only with the crust to differentiate one Neapolitan Margherita pizza from another. It's no surprise, then, that the pies that topped my list were those whose pizza-makers came from a background in bread or who were doing something beyond the boundaries (either association- or self-imposed) of traditional Neapolitan pizza.
A Pizza Spectrum
Here is a sort of continuum of pizza styles/philosophies among the places I visited this trip—in descending order, from strict constructionists at top to more liberal interpreters of the form. (Incidentally, this is also a list of the 19 different pizzerias I visited over the course of nine days.)
VPN Pizzerias
Tutta Bella
Via Tribunali
A16
Pizzeria Antica
Non-VPN Naples-Style
Nostrana*
Pizzaiolo
Flour + Water
Pizzeria Picco
Neapolitan-Inspired
Ken's Artisan Pizza
Pizzeria Delfina
Pizzeria Mozza
Pizzeria Bianco
Delancey
Neapolitan-American
Wy'east Pizza
Escape from New York Pizza
Al Forno Ferruza
Apizza Scholls
Emilia's Pizzeria
Doin' Their Own Thing
Serious Pie
By the time I got to the Los Angeles leg of my West Coast pizza journey, I found the flavor of many of these trad-Neapolitan pies blurring into one another—with some exceptions. And this might be the biggest heresy you'll see me write: By the time I got to the end of my journey, I was seriously questioning the deliciousness of Neapolitan Margherita pies in general.
Wait, I'm not going to hedge: Margherita pizzas are just plain ol' boring.
When I voiced this sentiment in the Slice–Serious Eats office yesterday morning, my colleage Carey Jones's jaw dropped.
"What? How can you say that? The Margherita pizza is my favorite form of pizza. Don't you want to wait for a week or two while you detox before you make that statement?"
OK. Maybe I'll go back to hedging. Mediocre Margherita pizzas are just plain' old boring. And, unfortunately, there's a lot of them out there. I did eat some great Margherita pies on the trip, but they were few and far between. And the best pizza I ate on the trip, the pizzas I'm still thinking about and craving now, five days after returning, are either decidedly non-Naples-style pizzas or those that are Neapolitan-inspired but that take the form in a new direction.
About midway through the trip, as I talked to Girl Slice on the phone, I said as much: "You know, these Margheritas are all at a certain level of goodness, but most of them lack something great. After eating your way through so many of them, you really come to appreciate it when you find pizza with a point of view."
"OMG, 'pizza with a point of view'?" she replied. "That was the most obnoxious foodie statement ever."
Whatevs. I still say it's true.
The Big Picture
A Margherita pizza from Ken's Artisan Pizza — one of the awesome, NOT-boring Margherita pies I sampled.
In order to get a handle on all I'd eaten and try to sort through the data points collected, I broke up the various pizzerias into a sort of spectrum (sidebar at right).
Once I did that, I noticed that the places that really made an impression on me started to register by the time I got to the "Non-VPN Naples-Style Pizzeria" places. And the places I'm still dreaming of are all in the "Naples-inspired" or the "Neapolitan-American" headings.
The best pizzas I had were from people who were unconcerned with meeting someone else's standard or even a perceived traditional-Neapolitan standard and who took their pies in different directions, whether they were Neapolitan-inspired or doin' their own thing.
When it comes down to it, it seems that many of the Neapolitan-traditionalists can't see the forest for the cheese.
My Conversion to Toppings
Pizzeria Bianco's Rosa pizza, topped with red onion, Parmigiano-reggiano, rosemary, and Arizona pistachios, is probably the best pizza I've ever eaten in my life. [Photograph: Robyn Lee]
In the past, I've always maintained that a Margherita pizza (in the case of a Neapolitan-style joint) or a plain slice or pie (in non-Neapolitan cases) should serve as a benchmark when considering a pizza or comparing one pizzeria to another of similar bent. I still believe that. If a pizzeria can't do a simple pie right, its other offerings won't be all that they can be.
But great toppings in interesting combinations are a godsend for otherwise so-so pies and make great ones ridiculously awesome. Yeah, an obvious statement, right? But for some reason, I used to stubbornly avoid toppings (except for my beloved sausage-and-onion combo). After some eye-opening pizza concoctions, though, I'm now a full-on topping nut. (Well, maybe not full-on — I'm not going to go for overloaded pies.) Creations like the sausage-and-cherry-bomb-pepper pie at Serious Pie (Seattle), the clam pie at Delancey (also in Seattle), the brussels sprouts-and-pancetta pizza at Motorino (NYC), and the Rosa at Phoenix's Pizzeria Bianco (red onion, Parmigiano-reggiano, rosemary, pistachios) are revelatory. I'm now rarin' to explore the world of toppings in more detail than I ever have before.
OK. Enough with this aside. I'll be back later tonight with the last of the Portland pizzerias I visited, and then I can finally blab about Seattle, the place where a crazy homeless man offered to sell me crack after I gave him some leftover pizza.
*I initially identified this place as a VPN pizzeria, based on a small VPN placard I had seen displayed above the bar, but it is not listed on the VPN Americas site nor on the Italian VPN parent site.