A Slice of Heaven: Washington, D.C.
Hey, Slicesters, Ed Levine here. If you follow this site regularly, you know we've been excerpting chapters and info from the pizza book I wrote, Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. Since Adam has been talking a lot about D.C. pizza as of late, I thought I'd post my chapter on the subject. Enjoy! —Ed
It was at Ella's Wood Fired Pizza, the first stop on my Washington, D.C., pizza tour, that I developed my owner-occupied pizza theory. I sat down at a table across from the beautiful, fire-engine-red, wood-fired brick oven and ordered a Margherita and a marinara pizza. I asked my waiter where Ella's got its mozzarella and sausage. He said he didn't know but would ask the chef, who was sitting at the bar. The chef then walked past my table on the way to the kitchen. I repeated the questions directly to him. He said, "I don't really know. I think the mozzarella comes from California, and the sausage, well, I don't have any idea. A lot of sausage comes from Pennsylvania, so maybe it's from there." This exchange did not fill my stomach with confidence; at the very least, a chef should know where his ingredients come from. Maybe he's new, I consoled myself, and his name couldn't be Ella. But there was no Ella in sight, and nobody else in charge.
Unsurprisingly, the pizzas were thoroughly mediocre. Much better than your run-of-the-mill slice place or chain, but nothing you'd travel even ten blocks for. Our next stop was Matchbox, which makes a big deal on its menu about its coal-fired oven and all the trips made to the great pizza emporia in New York. I ordered a medium half-plain, half-sausage pie, and asked our waitress where they got their mozzarella and sausage. She came back and said the guys making the pizza didn't know. Our pie arrived, and it was yellow, which meant they were using aged, not fresh, mozzarella. The sausage had a nice fennel taste, but the sauce was overpoweringly herbaceous. It tasted of dry, old oregano. The waitress came over and said they got their sausage from Sysco, a megasized food distributor. I appreciated her candor, but not the pizza. Once again I felt there was a pizza leadership vacuum at Matchbox. I was beginning to get discouraged about pizza in the District of Columbia. How could our nation's capital, full of college students, 20-somethings working on Capitol Hill, not to mention a hundred senators, 532 members of the House of Representatives, nine Supreme Court justices, and the president and vice-president not have at least a few solid slices? This state of affairs is unpatriotic, not to mention unregulated.
