Omnivore Atlanta

Hurry and get you a pair.

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Frank 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.

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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)

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