Omnivore - Late dinner at Fritti
The ‘Pizza Wars’ seem to have caused the restaurant’s sales to skyrocket
We hit Fritti tonight around 9:30 and found Enrico Liberato, the restaurant’s new pizzaiolo, hard at work, turning out pies for a crowd that was rather large for late Sunday night. In fact, restaurant owner Riccardo Ullio reports that business has been so good that April was the restaurant’s best month ever — by a large amount.
The flip side is that the wood-burning oven can hardly keep up with the demand, so Fritti will be getting a new one soon.
I departed from my usual Napoli tonight, and ordered the Robiola e Pesto, a white pie made with goat cheese, sundried tomatoes and argula pesto. Wayne ordered the Quattro Formaggi — four cheeses with San Marzano tomato sauce. Both were nearly perfect, but nothing beats the Napoli here.
The restaurant will begin offering a new pie made with scamorza affumicata in a few weeks. A smoked cow’s milk cheese, it’s seldom seen on menus in Atlanta. Ullio plans to develop some starters using the scarmoza, too.
Meanwhile, the Pizza Wars continue. Readers are still responding to my original Omnivore post about Varasano’s Pizzeria over a month ago. AJC critic Meridith Ford Goldman basically shared my own view of Varasano’s in her must-read review last week:
But often the pizzas are soggy and laden — and worse, inconsistent. A “New Haven clam” pie touts clams, mussels, lots of garlic and either a white or red sauce (all of which are far better on a mound of linguine than a mound of dough), at one offering limp and lifeless and at another much more appropriately crisped.
The rest of the menu is as uneven as the pizzas: the zeppole are a fun, but nothing sensational. Insalata Caprese is made with mealy heirloom tomatoes prepped ahead of time so that the entire salad is ice cold when it’s served, making it as much a heap of “tasteless cardboard” as Varasano so infamously calls Fritti’s pizza on his website.
It ain’t bragging if you can do it, goes the old baseball saying goes. Varasano’s Pizzeria has a little more doing to do.
Friends who visited Varasano’s last week had the same experience of radical inconsistency. I have to wonder if all the comparison to Varasano’s isn’t what has caused Fritti’s business to boom.
(Photo by Cliff Bostock)