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| - I could rave about the pizza, but I'm going to start by complimenting the Web site. The owner writes about apprenticing to a famous pizza maker in Italy, and then proceeds to tell you why Napoli-style pizza is distinct. There's a great line on the site about how pizza crust should only use flour from one mill in Italy, and how the tomatoes are never made into sauce but simply crushed over the dough. It's like Marcella Hazan's book, distilled into delicious bite-size web pages. (If you have read her classic Italian cookbook, you know what I mean...)
The web site also identifies where their ingredients come from. You're pretty hard-core when you're a pizzeria and your flour comes all the way from Italy. In fact, when you walk into the door, there's a big stack of flour sacks right behind the host stand.
All of this would be so pretentious if the pizza weren't awesome. And it is. This is the closest thing I've had to the pizzas I enjoyed in Rome on vacation two years ago. And for all the joking in this review about the flour, it really does make a difference. The crust absorbs the flavor of the toppings but does not get soggy, and it's robust enough to stay in one piece until you cut it.
The only con is, as many other reviewers have pointed out, the price. $13 for a pizza is pricey, but a plane ticket to Italy is at least $1,000, so I really don't think you can complain too much.
As a final thought, why is it that when an Italian politician says anything, you just let it go in one ear and out the other (see Berlusconi, Silvio for a modern example, or Craxi, Bettino for an earlier example -- corruption is really a bipartisan activity in Italy). However, if an Italian chef says that the building blocks of your meal are imported from Italy and cooked in an oven hand-assembled from bricks that are also imported from Italy, there's no question he's telling the truth?
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