Frank Bruni’s all over pizza
July 8th, 2009 by Cliff Bostock in RestaurantsFrank Bruni took a tour of New York pizza in yesterday’s New York Times. His summary is elegant if not surprising. (What isn’t about balance?):
A great pizza and great pasta are kinfolk. What’s a margherita, after all, but a canvas for tomato, cheese and herb with less slickness, more crunch and more portability than noodles? Many of the flavors are the same.
And be it salad, pasta or pizza, the surest element of success is balance. For pizza that means crispness shouldn’t come at the expense of tenderness, the crust can’t steal the thunder from the toppings, and toppings can’t run roughshod over the crust.
As for toppings, they should add a whisper of sweetness or murmur of heat to the milky, tangy, wonderful white noise of cheese. All of the pizza places in my list of new-generation favorites understand this. And almost all of my favorite pies exemplify it.
Bruni’s general experience seemed to be that nothing is very predictable. The same restaurant may produce pizzas of significantly varying quality. He uses Atlanta pizza-eaters favorite word, “char” (or a derivative thereof), four times in his article but also notes that a beautiful char can grace an insipid pizza.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:38 am
I’m almost done reading “American Pie” by Peter Reinhart, and the #1 take away so far is that in order to have consistently great (not good) pizza, you have to have a suberb pizzaiolo with the passion to man the oven every day. All I can think of is how I wish Jeff V was manning the oven at his restaurant…
July 9th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Jeff V has passion, but he isn’t a chef or restaurant cook. He is a home cook with some innovative ideas. He would likely be lost working in a restaurant kitchen… even his own.