American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza

Introduction

For a long time, I thought the best pizza in the country was from Mama’s in Bala Cynwyd, just outside of Philadelphia. And then something happened.

I grew up on Mama’s, even worked there briefly as a delivery boy, and found warm comfort in its stringy cheese and crisp, yet floppy crust whenever I’d been rejected for a date, lost a basketball game, or got together with high-school friends for a Saturday-night poker game. My family was equally hooked, and we often picked up a Mama’s pizza for dinner when my mom wanted a break from cooking, especially if going out for Chinese food, our other favorite pastime, seemed like too much trouble. We knew the owners of Pagano’s Pizzeria in West Philadelphia and often went there when we wanted an actual restaurant experience to go along with our pizza, pasta, and broasted chicken (they were pioneers in this now rarely seen pressurized frying system). But as good as Pagano’s pizza was, it never measured up to Mama’s for deeply felt satisfaction, a culinary balm of Gilead. More than forty years after eating my first Mama’s pizza, almost always made by Paul Castelucci (though I never knew his last name when I worked as a delivery boy), the business is still in the family, and the pizzas are now supervised, but not made, by Paul Jr., Paul’s son. Mama’s is still extremely popular, with long waiting times not only for pizza, but also for fabulous stromboli, hoagies, and cheese steaks.

My brother Fred, who now lives forty-five minutes from Mama’s instead of the five minutes of our childhood, continues to make the pilgrimage whenever he needs a fix. He brought us a Mama’s pizza when my wife, Susan, and I were in Philadelphia for a big food event. Susan had sprained her ankle at the airport just after we landed, forcing us to cancel our dinner plans so she could keep her foot on ice. When I called Fred to explain our plight, he said, No problem, I’ll pick up a pizza and some cheese steaks at Mama’s and we’ll eat in. I loved the idea. It had been years since my last Mama’s pizza.

The pizza arrived ninety minutes later, accompanied by Fred and his wife, Patty. I rushed through the greetings—hug, hug, great to see you—while Patty comforted Susan. I was captivated by the aroma of the pizzas and cheese steaks, and my mind floated away to distant times. It was like a long-lost friend, triggering painful and joyful memories that were flashing like a deck of cards rifled in front of my eyes. I’d deal with those later. For now, as far as I was concerned, it was about opening the pizza box, unwrapping the butcher paper from the cheese steaks, and getting everyone to stop talking and start eating. We divvied up the cheese steaks, which tasted even better than I remembered them to be, and then, at last, passed around slices of the pizza. I took a bite and stopped, the pleasant image-streaming of food memories suddenly interrupted by a mental disconnect. I shook it off and took another bite expecting an automatic memory flash to kick in so I could resume my forty-year flavor retrospective. Instead, I got a blast of Whoa!

There was definitely something amiss. The words just came out without forethought. Fred, they’ve changed the crust.

No they haven’t.

Yes they have.

No, they haven’t. Maybe it’s you.

I don’t think so. The crust is thicker and there are no air bubbles in the lip. Definitely not the Mama’s I grew up with.

I think it’s you.

No, it isn’t.

Fred took another bite. Well, it does seem a little thicker than usual. I heard they were breaking in a new pizza guy. But, I gotta tell you, it’s still pretty close to usual.

Maybe it is me, I thought. It wasn’t just that the crust was a little different. The cheese and sauce certainly still resonated with old memories, and even if it wasn’t the best Mama’s, it was close enough that it should have elicited, within my usually tolerant margin-for-error forgiveness code, at least a sigh of pleasure. But something had changed within me. My expectations, an internal bar of standards that is both conscious and subconscious, had been violated. A slow wave of realization set in, one that I couldn’t suppress even though I tried.

Maybe, I said to myself, it was never as good as I thought it was, just the best I’d been exposed to during my sheltered youth. I knew it was something I couldn’t say out loud because Fred and Patty still lived here, while I was going back to Providence and might not have another Mama’s pizza for years. Yet I couldn’t shake the thought.

Since 1990, when I left the communal setting of a religious order in which everyone lived a vow of poverty and thus had limited restaurant experience, I have had the privilege of teaching and writing about food, especially bread. I’ve traveled around the country and beyond, belatedly pursuing knowledge about my taste passions. These passions are simple, not of the great gourmand type. I have learned that one of my inherent gifts is the ability to recognize flavors and textures of universal appeal and show people how to reproduce them. As a result of this gift, I have carved out a career as an educator, writer, and product developer. Which brings me back to pizza.

I have had a steady stream of students who have their own sets of childhood food associations that have driven them to the gates of learning. Food memories, as James Beard and M.F. K. Fisher have shown us, are powerful and compelling forces. Wherever I teach, if I want to get a lively conversation going, I need only ask, Where do I find the best pizza around here? Nearly everyone has a pizza story and a strong opinion. Pizza, it seems, lives in everyone’s hall of fame.

In 1976, I worked in Raleigh, North Carolina, as a houseparent in a home for what we euphemistically called undisciplined teenagers; in other words, juvenile delinquents. There was a pizzeria on Hillsborough Street called Brothers Pizza, and although I barely remember the details of the place, I do remember the experience of it. I took the kids there whenever we needed to decompress from the latest dramatic event in our house, and there were always, always dramas. That pizza, and only that pizza among all the pizza shops in town, was a panacea, our emotional salve. It had a crispy, crackly crust, like hot buttered toast, comforting and satisfying. It was perfect. The cheese was stringy and slightly salty. Was it the best pizza I’d ever had? No, but it was perfect pizza, a peerless match of textures and flavors that fed more than our stomachs and palates. But if I had it now, all these years later, I imagine it would be like having a Mama’s now. It would be good, perhaps the same as it always was, but it wouldn’t be the pizza of 1976, when teenage boys and girls from shattered families, with broken hearts and raging hormones, felt safe enough to confess their fears to me and to one another as they ate their pizza. That pizza, out of that context, could never be that perfect again.

So here I was, years after Raleigh, in Philadelphia, realizing that I was caught in a nature versus nurture situation. Was it me or was it the pizza that had changed, or was it a little bit of both? I’m pretty sure that when I asked myself that question, I set this whole pizza quest in motion.

Pizzeria Bianco

A few years before what I now refer to as my Mama’s awakening, a student of mine at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco told me about a guy named Chris Bianco, who owned Pizzeria Bianco, in Phoenix, Arizona. She had worked at his restaurant prior to coming to school and raved about his pizza. By a happy coincidence, I was headed to Phoenix for the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, which is always held in a different city. Most of us went to Phoenix expecting to experience a blitz of great Southwest cuisine, and we weren’t disappointed. But the restaurant that had the biggest buzz of all was Pizzeria Bianco, located just a short walk from the convention center in downtown Phoenix.

I was scheduled to make a presentation on bread-baking techniques at one of the conference workshops, so prior to leaving San Francisco, I asked my Phoenix student to recommend a bakery that I could partner with for making my workshop breads. She said there weren’t any good bread bakeries, but that Chris Bianco made his own bread for his pizzeria, and it was easily the best in town. I called him and we arranged to bake bread together.

When I got to town, I walked over to Pizzeria Bianco with Steve Garner, a friend of mine who hosts a radio food show in Santa Rosa, California, and John Ash, one of the great chefs of America who also cohosts the show with Steve. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and the restaurant wasn’t scheduled to open for another two hours. My idea was that we’d talk and plan out our bread baking, but Chris insisted on making us a couple of pizzas first.

Okay, I said without resistance, hoping, but doubtful, that they would live up to their reputation. A few minutes later, two perfect, I mean perfect, pizzas landed on our table, a classic Margherita and a white pizza with arugula and onions, and all thought of bread baking vanished for the moment. Steve and John immediately kicked into their radio-interview mode and began grilling Chris about his pizzas. We learned that as a young man with cooking talent he had gone to Naples from the Bronx, his hometown, to learn how to make true Neapolitan pizza. When his family moved to Phoenix, he decided to make his culinary statement by trying to create the best pizza in the world. He made his own mozzarella cheese and grew his own basil and lettuce behind the restaurant. He and his brother, Marco, made their own rustic Italian bread (similar to ciabatta) from the pizza dough, and their mother came in to make the three desserts on the menu. Chris served five types of pizza (no substitutes, please), house salad, an appetizer course, beverages, and dessert. There was no pasta course on the menu, nor any other entrée. It was just a pizzeria, but with haute cuisine attitude. I asked him why no pasta.

I think I actually could make the best pasta in town, and if we served it people would love it, he explained. But then I’d have my attention divided and the pizzas might suffer. So I decided my true goal is to make the best pizza in the world. If I ever want to do pasta, I’ll open a different restaurant and do it there.

Did he have plans to do just that? He smiled sheepishly and said, No, not really. You’ve got to understand, I love making pizza.

We talked for quite awhile and I realized it was almost five o’clock. A crowd had been gathering outside the front door for over an hour—hot, anxious people hoping to be in the first wave to grab one of the forty-two seats and not have to wait for the second seating. (I soon learned that this is a daily ritual at Bianco.)

Chris anticipated my question and said, I don’t do takeout. Can’t keep up. Besides, I want them to eat the pizza the way it’s meant to be eaten, right out of the oven. It’s just not the same out of the box. But even so, a wood-fired oven can only handle so many pies and that’s that. He excused himself to get ready for dinner.

Now we were getting dirty looks from some of the people peering through the window, wondering why we were on the inside, eating pizza, while they had to wait until the doors opened at five. More to the point, probably, they were worried our three precious seats might not be available when the doors opened. So, we made our exit, and a collective sigh of relief rose from the line.

The next morning I returned to make my bread dough and watched Chris make his pizza dough. I don’t use a mixer, just a big bowl and my hands, he said. Sure enough, he combined about fifty pounds of flour (specially flown in from the Giusto’s mill in San Francisco) with salt, yeast, and water. Unlike most American pizza makers, he used no oil, true to the Neapolitan rule.

It’s really all about feel, he explained. I have to make it by hand because it’s the only way to really know when it’s right. I can just feel what adjustments are needed and when it’s ready.

Twenty minutes later we had finished mixing our respective doughs. Mine, using a new technique I had just learned in France, had to be chilled, but Chris’s dough stayed out, covered in the bowl, to ferment slowly. Hours later he divided it into smaller pieces for either pizza or bread, shaped his loaves, and again allowed the dough to ferment, chilling the evening pizza dough in the refrigerator and leaving the bread pieces out for Marco to bake off later. The rest of the time he and his crew did all the prep, making the sauces, picking lettuce and basil from the garden, and readying themselves for the rush of people gathered at the still-locked door.

Watching Chris work helped me to realize how much I still had to learn about that simple yet complex substance called dough and, more importantly, about how dough is transformed, in the hands of a skilled pizzaiolo (pizza maker) into pizza. A few years passed and I got deeper and deeper into the intricacies of bread making, trying to figure out how, as I described it, to evoke the full potential of flavor from the grain. In developing pizza dough for several companies, I gradually came to understand what causes some dough to be better than others. I ate a lot of pizza along the way and tasted many toppings and, more important, heard many pizza philosophies. Whenever the subject of great pizza came up, I mentioned Bianco. At first I was met with laughter and disbelief. The idea of great pizza in Phoenix just didn’t compute. But then I ran into people who knew about Pizzeria Bianco, either from experience or from reading or hearing about it.

It had been a while since I’d tasted the pizza at Pizzeria Bianco, so I began to doubt my memory. Shortly after the Mama’s awakening, I ran into one of my favorite food writers, Jeffrey Steingarten, and he asked me who I thought made the best pizza. I used to think it was Mama’s in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, I told him, but now I think it might be Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix.

He hadn’t been there but had heard of it. How can you call it the best if you haven’t tried Frank Pepe’s or Sally’s in New Haven, or John’s or Grimaldi’s in New York City? he asked.

Of course he was right. Pizzeria Bianco might have been the best I’d ever had, but there were so many other legendary places still to try. So I did go to Pepe’s, Sally’s, Grimaldi’s, John’s, and many other places. I went to Genoa and then to Naples, into the belly of the beast, to the source, and then returned to America to immerse myself in pizza of all types: classic, modern, avant-garde, you name it. I was searching for the perfect slice. That meant I had to discover what perfection, at least pizza perfection, really is. Along the way I went back to Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix to find out if my memory held true, or if it was to be another Mama’s moment, surpassed by even better pizza found elsewhere.

In the pages that follow, I recount the journey that took place between my two visits to Phoenix, plus some trips that followed it. (This is a journey with no clear endpoint; it doesn’t begin or end with Pizzeria Bianco or Mama’s, but is merely signposted by them.) I had become a hunter of sorts, a pizza hunter, and I enlisted others to join me on the hunts. With Mama’s no longer the benchmark, and with the memory of Pizzeria Bianco serving as a temporary beacon and standard, I sought out great pizza everywhere I traveled, and I traveled to seek out great pizza.

Some of the numerous pizza excursions I choreographed were thwarted by circumstances: trip cancellations, a restaurant Closed sign, logistical mix-ups. But almost every time something went wrong, something else occurred to make it all right. In fact, Plan B was often better than Plan A could ever have been. As result I came up with the Reinhart Pizza Hunter’s Credo, a sound axiom for anyone who decides to adopt it: It’s all about the adventure, not the pizza. The pizza is just grace.

Sometimes my fellow pizza hunters made the hunt itself a more memorable adventure than the pizza did. I had so many interesting conversations around a pizza, on the way to get a pizza, or in anticipation of a pizza, that the pizza itself became the excuse for the hunt. But every now and then, the quality of the pizza transcended the hunt, stopped all conversation and refocused everything on itself, the object and subject, and the thrill of the hunt fulfilled itself in the quarry. When that happened it was magical, and all that mattered again was pizza.

So, I followed the trail wherever it led. And where it inevitably led, to no one’s surprise, was Italy.

Those who have traveled to Naples, or to Genoa and its surrounding Ligurian coast, know that American pizza and focaccia (the northern Italian version of pizza) are not always the same as what we call Neapolitan, or Napoletana, pizza or Ligurian focaccia. There are a number of reasons for this difference, and it is not necessarily a bad thing that ours are different from theirs. Pizza is, and has always been, a work in progress.

My Greek friends insist that pizza isn’t even originally Italian, but Greek, brought to Naples by Peloponnesians escaping the Ottomon Turks or, much earlier, by Trojans fleeing the builders of that famous horse. Indeed, most Greeks are happy to take credit for contributions from both eras and like to connect nearly everything in Italy to their famous ancestors, Odysseus and Aeneas. In relation to pizza, their reasoning may be accurate. Naples, originally called Neapolis, was founded in the sixth century B.C. by Greek colonists from the even earlier nearby settlement of Cumae. We also know that the ancient Greeks made a flatbread with toppings called placenta.

But here’s the pith of it: Pizza evolved from one of the most basic food concepts—bread and topping, specifically dough cooked over or in a fire, finished off with sauce, oil, cheese, whatever was at hand. Did the Greeks invent it? Why not the Egyptians? Or the Indians? Forget about who invented pizza. The real question is where was it perfected, where was it elevated from a simple peasant food to the craft, to the art form we appreciate today? You do not have to be an Italian or even an Italian American to know the answer to that one. When Gennaro Lombardi brought pizza to New York City’s Lower East Side in 1905, he brought it from Italy; his influence was the pie of Naples. But the fuel in New York was coal, not the wood of southern Italy, so from the moment pizza hit the shores of America, modification and adaptability were inevitable. Thus began the evolution (some would say the devolution) of pizza as we now know it.

I knew I would have to visit the surviving great early pizzerias of America, not only for the pleasure of their pies, but also to back my response to the inescapable challenge, How can you say Pizzeria Bianco is the best if you haven’t been to —? But even more important, I knew I would have to (would want to, would love to) visit the original role models, the pizzerias of Naples and the focaccerie of Liguria, to understand what they had fostered on this side of the Atlantic. In other words, I would have to go to Italy.

LIGURIA

I began my search for the roots of pizza in the port city of Genoa, the commercial heart of the northwest region of Liguria. Susan and I settled into a hotel room just around the corner from the statue of Christopher Columbus near the central train station, and then set out to explore this hardworking harbor town known as the epicenter of focaccia alla genovese. The people of Genoa are as proud of their focaccia as the Neapolitans are of their pizza. Some variation of it is served at most meals. Focaccerie, similar to the pizza-by-the-slice shops of New York City, are found every few blocks in this colorful, maritime town, which meant that freshly baked focaccia was never more than a few minutes away, no matter where we found ourselves.

In my brief sampling, I came to the following conclusion: focaccia is not automatically extraordinary just because it is made in Genoa. Like pizzas everywhere, focaccia can be great, good, or forgettable. Whether topped with cheese, onions, potatoes, cured meats, or pesto or another sauce, the bread itself is usually good but seldom outstanding, mind-numbing, conversation stopping, or otherwise memorable.

One thing I learned during two previous trips to Italy is that while Italians love bread, you won’t find great bread everywhere in the country. The ratio of world-class bread to average bread is about the same as in the United States. Even so, Italians are loyal to their local bread products, regardless of outside opinion. For instance, while visiting Bologna, I encountered the manino, a roll shaped to look like a hand. The locals raved to me about how special this bread was, and I found I had to hide my disappointment when I finally tried some. What was special was that the Bolognans had grown up with this unusually shaped bread. What was a bit perplexing was how these food-savvy people could be so deluded about their dry, overly starchy bread that had no discernible special property other than its shape. This is not an unusual circumstance. People are notoriously—and naturally—chauvinistic to the point of delusion about many of the things they have known since childhood. I myself am that way—or once was—about Mama’s pizza.

The focaccia of Genoa was certainly better than the manino of Bologna. But would I make a return trip for it? No. The focaccia in San Francisco’s North Beach, from the aptly named Liguria Bakery, is as good. The focaccia-like pizza at Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan is substantially better. The focaccia my culinary students make is actually as good or better than anything I had in Genoa.

Well, do you think we should still go to Recco? Susan asked.

We’ve got nothing to lose, I replied, trying to remain hopeful that something new and different awaited us there.

We bought train tickets for the forty-five-minute ride to Recco, a small town just south of Genoa. Carol Field, author of The Italian Baker among other classics, and Johanne Killeen and George Germon, owners of the Al Forno Restaurant in Providence had all said we must go to try the local focaccia col formaggio di Recco. Once on the train, Susan asked me what I thought about the focaccia in Genoa. Our conversation went something like this:

Well, focaccia is just bread with something on it or in it. So if it’s going to be memorable, the bread has to be really, really good. The breakfast focaccia at the hotel, plain with just a little salt and aniseed on top, was good. It was flavorful, the bread was moist and not dry—I liked it. But will I dream about it? Will I crave it when we get home and regret not being able to find anything like it? I doubt it. The pesto focaccia from the shop near our hotel was good. The sauce was wonderful, which I would expect here in Genoa since pesto, focaccia, and Christopher Columbus are the three things for which the city is famous.

So what’s the big deal then about focaccia? Susan asked.

"The potential for greatness is always there, but I think focaccia is like most things that have been around for a while: bakers settle into a routine until someone comes along and pushes the envelope. As long as people buy it at this level, most bakers have no incentive to take it to another level. I’m sure there are focaccerie that do it better than what we’ve sampled, and bakers who know there are ways to make the bread better. That said, I do appreciate one thing about all Genoa focaccia: the thickness. In the States, focaccia is usually too thick—more than an inch and sometimes even two inches tall—so that it becomes too much about the bread and not enough about the topping. Here, it’s just right, about a half inch thick, and even though it looks like it’s going to be dry, it stays moist and creamy. That’s the most valuable thing I saw in Genoa."

As we pulled into our stop, Susan sighed, Well I hope this Recco focaccia is better than what we’ve had so far. We would soon discover that she had just uttered the understatement of the trip.

The train station stood at the top of a hill, and the street that led away from it spiraled down to sea level and the Via Roma, the main street