October! National Pizza Month! This month we'll be bringing you Daily Slice, quick snapshots of slices and pies all of us at the Serious Eats empire have been enjoying lately. —The Mgmt.

[Photographs: Carey Jones]

I spent much of my childhood listening to my Jersey-born father bemoan the lack of good pizza in Palo Alto, California, where I grew up. While my Bay Area hometown has a wealth of dining options for a city of its size, good pizza was never among them; Papa Murphy's Take and Bake was our pie of choice. (Not recommended.) So I was surprised and delighted when Howie's Artisan Pizza opened a year ago, heralding the arrival of the artisanal pizza renaissance in the Peninsula.

Howard Bulka, the namesake "Howie," had been chef and proprietor at the well-regarded restaurant Marche in the neighboring town of Menlo Park before he turned his attention to pizza. What he's come up with? Pies with a deliciously chewy sourdough crust, the dough cold-fermented for up to 24 hours before it's fired in a gas-fired Marsal brick oven. My favorite so far is topped with red Fresno chili, red onion, mozzarella, and a fatty, chewy pancetta of Berkshire pork, cured in-house. Cheffy pizza a mile from where I grew up? The pizza world really has changed.

Howie's Artisan Pizza

Town and Country Village, 855 El Camino Real, Palo Alto CA 94301 (map)
650-327-4992; howiesartisanpizza.com