Waiting For Good Dough

If you think there's no good pizza in Philly, you're not looking hard enough.

by Drew Lazor

Neal Santos Corn, cilantro, mushroom and bacon pizza at Zavino

The pizza in Philly sucks.

You have heard someone say this. And there's a good chance that someone was you.

After all, a loathsome view of our native pizza-craft is Philadelphia parlance in its purest form. To malign this city's reputation for heat-blistered dough — a place that has always been, and will always be, a sandwich town, down to its provolone-shrouded DNA — is to embrace Philly's tortuous, punch-drunk hate affair with its own geographic inferiority.

People blame the water. People blame New York City, lamenting that the greatest Italian pizza-makers didn't stray far enough south after deboarding butt-to-gut passenger ships on Ellis Island. Some even blame La Cosa Nostra — the grinning old South Philly wives' tale goes that the local mafia chapter, in its heyday, had such an unshakable chokehold on deliveries of flour, mozzarella and tomato sauce that every pizzeria in town ended up with the same mediocre products, sending a chilling effect down the spines of generations of kids hoping for a solid slice and a cold Coke on a sticky Saturday afternoon.

Drew Lazor

Pepperoni pie at Pizzeria Stella

Restaurateur Stephen Starr, in the months leading up to the fall 2009 opening of his Pizzeria Stella in Headhouse Square, caused a minor uproar when he told KYW Newsradio that he decided to pursue the project because he "can't get really good pizza here in Philadelphia." A subsequent thread on local dining site Foobooz earned dozens of pointed reactions; close to half of them agreed with Starr's sentiment. (In Dec. 2009, Starr clarified his position, telling City Paper that Port Richmond's Tacconelli's was "the only pizza in Philadelphia I thought was good.")

Point being, whether you're the head of a multi-million-dollar hospitality conglomerate or an irascible food blog reader, it's easy to malign a food as universally familiar as pizza — and it's even easier to idle while those plaintive murmurs enter the epicurean echo chamber, ensuring that those uninterested in forming their own opinions embrace generalization as gooey-cheesed gospel.

In my summation, though, the state of Philadelphia pizza is stronger than ever. This city's stable of respected pizzerias has been bolstered by an influx of passionate, obsessive dough stretchers, so-called "artisans" who raise the construction of the common slice from expressionless task to tempestuous art form. But Philadelphia pizza is about so much more than just them.

The logical place to begin an examination of "Philadelphia pizza" is defining what that actually is. Do we have a singular pizza identity, a standout approach that anyone can spot and immediately brand as a product of the 215? There's the cheeseless, focaccia-like tomato pie squares stocked at Italian corner bakeries throughout the region, as well as the sauce-on-top, cheese-on-bottom thin-crust rounds (also called tomato pie, confusingly) served along Frankford Avenue in Northeast Philly, but both are too comfortable in their respective niches to speak for an entire city. After talking to multiple pizza authorities, chefs and pizza-makers, I've reached a dual conclusion on this issue. The polite answer is no, there is no widespread style visible above all others in Philadelphia. The impolite answer? Yes, there is one — but it's no good.

When Inquirer restaurant critic Craig LaBan arrived here 12 years ago, he most commonly uncovered "big, Greek pizzeria pies, a sweet kind of profile, a lot of cheese," stuff cranked out by the budget parlors that also specialize in chicken fingers and cheese fries. "Usually really low-grade ingredients … nothing distinctive at all. Nothing that [would stand] out in a national search for pizza."

"If there's a signature pizza, I don't like it," says Frank Maimone, entering his 10th year running Rustica Pizza in Northern Liberties, "because it looks anemic and white and not cooked."

Alyssa Grenning

Marlo Dilks, who with her husband, Jason, owns the SliCE parlors at 10th and Federal and 18th and Sansom, grew up at 20th and Ritner and remembers her father refusing to eat South Philly-sourced pies her mother brought home on Friday evenings, when the traditional Italian-Catholic family refrained from eating meat. At your run-of-the-mill Philly pizza place, Dilks feels, "you don't get very Italian pizza — you get very Americanized, fast-food pizza. "

"Go anywhere in the country to a pizza joint [and] most places have signs boasting that they're this style pizza, or that city's kind of pie," says Brian Dwyer, a Kensington-based artist so fanatical about pizza that he actually curated a lighthearted exhibit on the topic at Rocket Cat Café this May. "You don't get a lot of that around here. You just have … well, pizza."

And so it goes: What constitutes Philadelphia pizza cannot be summed up in a tidy, Wiki-friendly sound bite. The onus, then, falls into the flour-dusted hands of this city's individual pizza-makers, whose disciplines, influences and inspirations vary as wildly as their beliefs of what it takes to turn an everyman snack into an elemental experience.

Pizza-makers — or "pizzaioli," the Italian term that's found footing in authenticity-fixated circles — don't agree on much, if anything. They can be opinionated, disorienting and downright temperamental. But the one thing they pore over in equal stead is the details. Pizza, perhaps the most straightforward-on-paper food this side of peanut butter and jelly, is infinitely complicated in its execution; a microscopic recipe augmentation can translate into a huge difference in final product. A passing query can expand into an hourlong discussion about Italian flour, oven placement, "leoparding" (a term for the char marks on the underside of a pie) or wood versus coal versus gas faster than you can say "extra cheese."

Marc Vetri, who provides much-buzzed-about pies at his three-year-old Osteria, is intimately familiar with the challenge. "There's more humidity in the air," he says. "Less humidity in the air. Water temperature. Add a little water sometimes. Add a little sugar. A little brandy. All these little nuances. Should we cook it at a higher heat right now? Store [the dough] at room temperature right now? Store it in the cold? Millions of little different things."

Drew Lazor

Dough proofing at Tacconelli's

"Like anything simple, if you have just a few main ingredients, you have to pay attention," says Steve Gonzalez, chef and partner at Zavino at 13th and Sansom. When working with three equally vital variables — dough, cheese, sauce — if just one is askew, "you diminish your product by 33 percent off the bat."

"When you really get into the nitty-gritty," LaBan says, "it is the little things that take something that everybody thinks they know and transform it into something really special." (LaBan is a former pizzaiolo himself, sort of — his first job as a kid in his native Detroit was at Little Caesar's.)

One of those little things that spurs a large debate in pizza-craft is the role a region's water plays in the quality of dough — some New Yorkers, for instance, brag that a property inherent in the Big Apple's municipal water contributes heavily to their pizza quality. I've posed the water question to multiple pizza-makers; most dismiss it as baseless myth, pure pizza poppycock. But at least one Philly landmark believes it matters. "I truly think that the water from Philadelphia makes a big difference," says Mauricio DeLuca, owner of East Passyunk Avenue's Marra's. Open since 1927, the institution still fires pies in its original volcanic-brick oven, perhaps the only fully operational artifact in South Philly not named Jerry Blavat.

DeLuca has another pizzeria in New Jersey, and says that location's pies are generally inferior to what he makes in Philly — and they're working with identical recipes and ingredients. "Philly water is much better somehow," he says. "It goes real well with flour."

Not everyone agrees. "I think it's bullshit," says Chris Painter, culinary director for Stephen Starr's restaurants. The only water-related tweaks he deems scientifically plausible are environmental — humidity calls for dialed-down water content during the dough-mixing, whereas drier, colder weather sees boosted hydration. "[In] Phoenix, they certainly don't have New York's water out there — but they have Pizzeria Bianco," adds Painter, referring to chef Chris Bianco's internationally celebrated pizza destination.

Did I mention pizza people can be opinionated?

Neal Santos JOHN DOUGH: John Tacconelli is the fourth generation of Tacconellis to work the brick oven at the Port Richmond pizzeria that bears his name. He's a master pizza-maker, but he doesn't like the stuff. "It's the last thing I'll eat," he says.

John doesn't like pizza. At all. Which may surprise you, considering his last name is Tacconelli.

"I don't eat pizza," shrugs the pizza-maker, the fourth generation of Tacconelli men to work the oven at the Port Richmond destination — yes, where you must "reserve" your dough — with the light-up window featuring his family name in tricolor neon. "That's the last thing I'll eat." It's a drizzly Friday afternoon, and the no-frills dining room, which was crammed to capacity when I was in for a seven-pizza grubfest two days earlier, is cool, empty and spotless. Best-of awards are framed over booths and tables; some time in the '80s, John says, the national accolades just started pouring in.

Drew Lazor

John is 51; he started working at Tacconelli's, which his great-grandfather Giovanni opened in 1948, at age 12. He grew up in the space above the massive, 20-by-20-foot oven — I've lived in apartments smaller than this thing — that he, and only he, operates. "I don't trust nobody," he says. "You gotta know the oven. You don't know the oven, you mess a lot of pies up."  

That oven, powered by an oil burner, takes up one entire wall of the kitchen; its square, metal-braced mouth could be mistaken for a dumbwaiter. Right in front of this opening is where John spends most of his evenings, seeing dough rounds off as they take the plunge into brick-baked bliss.

Drew Lazor

Inside the 20-by-20-foot brick oven at Tacconelli's

John's got a thick head of hair, and it's been turning white at a sprinter's pace since he returned to pizza full-time five years ago to replace his retired father, says Roseanne, John's sweet, chuckling wife of 23 years. She's the one who answers the phone when you ring to put your name in the morning of. ("Eight people, seven pies, 7 p.m.")

Some find this policy unreasonably difficult; others consider it an affront to pizza's implied convenience. But the fact of the matter is that John, solo oven man, is also John, solo dough man. He mixes it every morning they're open, and he only makes so much. He doesn't let his dough ferment overnight, the flavor-coaxing flirtation most other pizza-makers engage in. His oven does best when the stuff's warm, so he balls it up on trays and shrouds it with white towels the same color as the V-neck tee that is his work uniform. John's back's a little crooked and he wears a perpetual look of exhaustion on his ruddy face, gifts from 14-hour shifts spent on his feet, jostling wooden peels longer than an economy sedan. He doesn't smile often, but he does when his wife pokes fun at him.

Drew Lazor

Margherita pizza and white pizza at Tacconelli's

Tacconelli's has always been the first name in Philly pizza, and John's crust is what keeps those reservation books filled — very thin, with a sneaky, intoxicating snap that's at its best when it arrives to the party dressed casually (the menu recommends no more than three toppings per pie, but I say two max). Nothing fancy to the dough — just Gold Medal flour, shortening, salt, yeast and water. The sauce is smooth, not too sweet and well-seasoned ("I touch it up, you know?"). The margherita and the granulated-garlic-sprinkled white pie are the beginning and the end, but pretty much any topping combo wins.

With its loyal customer base and tucked-away coordinates, it seems unlikely that Tacconelli's would experience any sort of residual rumble from a flashy debut all the way down in Society Hill. But they did. When Starr's Pizzeria Stella first opened, "we were busier than we ever were," says Roseanne. "It was crazy. We were booming."

It's 3:42 p.m. at Pizzeria Stella, and I'm sitting alone at the bar wrapped around the bulbous mosaic igloo that is their Renato wood-burning oven. I place an order for a "San Daniele." Sous chef Matt Conover nods.

I blink once and he's got a dough ball rolled out; he scatters hunks of smoked mozzarella and fior di latte across his raw canvas with inexact nonchalance, like he's dealing a couple buddies in on a hand of poker. I blink again and the pie's made its way through the narrow mouth of the Renato. I blink a third time, and the cheese is bubbling; the outer crust (pizza nerds call this the "cornichone," or crown) inflates instantly, like an air mattress (pizza nerds call this "oven spring"). Conover grabs a metal paddle off what looks like a pool cue rack. Turns the pie 90 degrees. Then 90 degrees more. Peeks at the bottom, turns it. Peeks again. Hoists the pie up close to the flame-licked roof of the oven for a split second, darkening the soot-black heat blisters. The pie comes out, and Conover finishes off the steaming shell with a handful of arugula and ribbons of prosciutto.

Drew Lazor

San Daniele at Pizzeria Stella

It's 3:47 p.m. at Pizzeria Stella, and I'm eating a very late, very good lunch.

It's quiet now, but on their busiest days, when this 10-month-old pizzeria's smattering of teal elementary-school chairs are occupied from noon to night, the chefs can repeat this process 700 times. Still, for a place helmed by Starr, Philadelphia's maestro of the see-and-be scene, the operation comes off remarkably staid. Shouldn't there be at least a few Day-Glo cocktails or trippy wall dressings thrown into the mix? Can a brother get a vintage photo booth?

"It's downscale by comparison, easily — a lot different than what I'm used to," admits Stella chef Shane Solomon, who's put in most of his time at large-scale Starr joints like Tangerine and Parc. This was a calculated opening for Starr. Artisan pizza is "a trendy thing right now, there's no doubt about that," says Solomon. "But it also mirrors the economy. A lot of chefs and restaurateurs [are] looking at some options that people can afford."

Neither he nor SRO culinary director Painter had much experience with pizza or wood-burning ovens (Stella's eats a cord of white oak a week) prior to this project. Starr's state-hopping trip to various pizza landmarks with his inner circle earned plenty of attention; less publicized were the months spent in the test kitchen, agonizing over the dough. Solomon and Painter tested somewhere in the vicinity of 30 different recipes. They eventually narrowed the field down to two finalists — and that's when it got difficult, with the chefs wrestling with minuscule edits down to the half-percent of water. The sourdough yeast starter they use to craft their dough came from former Parc baker Jim McAleese, who also used it to birth the Starr brasserie's popular baguette.

Drew Lazor

Their at-once pillowy and substantial final product is not quite Neapolitan, that being a style that Painter characterizes as "polarizing." In old Napoli, the birthplace of pizza, pies are always baked in wood-burning ovens like the Renato, but the dough is traditionally softer and droopier than what most of us grew up eating (it's got more water, and no fat or oil). Stella half-Americanizes theirs, cutting fine-ground, high-protein Italian "double zero" flour with a domestic counterpart to encourage more bite. Simple pies like the pepperoni and margherita have their place alongside flash-bang fodder like the signature triple-truffled tartufo, topped with an over-easy egg whose yolk — in a classic Starr touch — is broken tableside with a spoon by a spunky server in trim jeans and Chuck Taylors.

There will always be knee-jerk hate from those who feel the Starr brand is oversaturated — that he's more flash than dash. But there's something different, something transparent about Stella.

"The more I've eaten this style of pizza," Solomon says, "the less I want to eat other things."

Steve Gonzalez makes interesting pizzas, and he's not interested in talking about them.

This past winter, in the weeks leading up to the opening of his narrow wine bar Zavino at 13th and Sansom, I stopped in to ask the Southwest Philly native, 30, a couple of questions about what he had planned. My first had something to do with his take on the city's pizza culture.

"As a pizza guy, do you ... "

"I'm not a pizza guy," he responded flatly.

"Oh. Uh … "

I bring it up to Gonzalez on a recent weekday morning, as he preps with his daytime pizza guy, Joe Beddia, and their "padawan," Jeremy Schmidt, a floppy-haired recent high school grad eager to learn the ropes. (He immediately gets tasked pasta crank duty.) After razzing Beddia over a recent review on the national pizza blog Slice that characterized the char marks on the bottom of his pie as "sparse" ("It wasn't that bad," Gonzalez reassures, smirking), he addresses the exchange. "You don't have to have a chopper to call yourself a biker," he says. "If you feel good getting on a moped and driving around, you're a biker."

Drew Lazor

Zavino's dough

It's a curveball in the dirt, but I follow the logic — people tend to define themselves by embracing or damning labels, but the labels themselves don't mean jack. What's compelling about Zavino, though, is that Gonzalez is right. Despite stints in Italy as well as at Jim Lahey's famed Co. in NYC, a pizza guy he ain't. He's close to the anti-pizzaiolo, a chef who is able to make good pies without being seduced by the vanity of the practice.

"It's just been a great platform to do other things," says Gonzalez of Zavino, whose backers, like Stella's, agreed that pizza was an attractive starting point in this still-rocky economic climate. He earns nods aplenty for his clever, seasonally conscious non-pizza fare — pastas, veg and charcuterie plates, killer crudos. "What we really try to focus on is the quality of our product … [we] don't worry about being loud and making a spectacle."

The fastest-moving pizzas here include the Polpettini, topped with a bold minimalist sauce, provolone cheese and teeny veal meatballs the size of jawbreakers; and his pie built around housemade sausage and sweet peppers. Recently, he's been doing a ridiculous sweet corn, cilantro, mushroom and bacon pizza that eats like a CSA haul.

Drew Lazor

Zavino's EarthStone pizza oven

Zavino's pizzas are close to true Neapolitan, as far as the dough recipe's concerned. Italian double zero flour meets yeast meets H2O — the only non-purist liberty they take is adding a bit of sugar. Gonzalez's EarthStone oven, which sits at the end of the gently snaking bar like a fortified wigwam, blasts out pies in a matter of minutes. He doesn't see its gas-powered heat source as a detriment, log-burning proponents be damned. "It goes back," says Gonzalez, "to your flour and your tomatoes and your cheese."

Again, he's not a pizza guy.

Though he's one of Philly's most steady-handed chefs, Marc Vetri derives a certain joy from inconsistency — at least where pizza's concerned.

"The most awesome thing about all of it is the non-uniformity," says the owner of Vetri, Osteria and Amis, whose first salvo into pizza-craft came as a 22-year-old, working a wood-fire oven three nights at week at chef Wolfgang Puck's now-closed Malibu restaurant Granita. "It's charred on one side, and it's kind of blond on the other. Kind of toasted on one side, kind of crunchy here … but it's kind of soft here."

"If it's all exactly the same," says Vetri, now 43, "it's kind of like … whoopee."

While his pies may be irregular, the plaudits are anything but: Along with Osteria's chef, newly minted James Beard winner Jeff Michaud, Vetri is often credited with kick-starting Philadelphia's renewed interest in pizza-craft. GQ's Alan Richman placed one of Osteria's pies at No. 22 on his 2009 list of America's 25 best pizzas. (Besting him at No. 8? Tacconelli's.) "Marc was the one who really brought the credibility to pizza, putting it in a restaurant that's easily top 10 in the city," says the Inquirer's LaBan.

In a throwback to his Puck-ed up days, Vetri himself worked the one-man pizza oven station at Osteria for its first three months in operation in early 2007. It wasn't for nostalgia's sake — the only other person on staff at that time who could properly roll out the dough and bake the pies was Michaud, who was indisposed running the line, leaving Vetri as the first and only fill-in. About a week after Osteria opened, Vetri reveals, he had to fly to Florida for a two-day event; the restaurant had no choice but to temporarily suspend pizza service, fibbing to crust-craving diners that there was a crack in the oven awaiting repair.

Everyone's up to speed now, so much so that Osteria currently practices two distinct dough disciplines, both derived from high-end King Arthur flour: In addition to their original crispy Roman-style thin crust, which bakes rather uniformly (thank good olive oil for that), they do a proper Neapolitan style, as well. In one bar sitting, I tore through a Pannocchia, spread with sweet, pure corn crema in lieu of sauce and topped with scallions, corn kernels, creamy pebbles of mozzarella di bufala and truffle shavings; and the Neapolitan Pesca, a bewitching, puffy-crowned gem topped with peaches, chanterelles, mozzarella and rice-paper-thin strips of house-cured lardo.

But at $19 and $22, respectively, these pies are among the priciest in Philly, setting Osteria apart from the competition — and not necessarily in a good way. Vetri understands this — he's up-front that they're simply not a pizzeria, but "a restaurant that also serves pizza." And he doesn't see any reason why Philly's roster of artisan pizzas wouldn't be able to exist peaceably along with the folks who do their work in the takeout/delivery bracket. "I like ours, and I like Tacconelli's, and I like [South Street's] Lorenzo's at 1 in the morning," he says. "Whatever, you know?"

Drew Lazor

A portion of the huge crowd at the South Philly Review Pizzalympics

Penns Landing Caterers is packed for South Philly Review's Pizzalympics. Packed. It's $10 to get in and eat yourself into a stupor, but if I didn't know any better, I'd assume that having at least two sisters named after saints would also serve as a form of admission. There's a gorgeous, mint-condition 1957 Chevy Bel Air pulled up outside; Hy Lit Radio broadcasts from the stage, blasting Tommy James & The Shondells and shouting out the dozen-plus South Philly pizza parlors vying for audience-selected honors.

All the names are easy to recognize, either from goofy local TV spots or menus in your mail slot or simply just because they deliver you dinner — J&J, Not Just Pizza, Pizza Shack, Adriana's, Napoli, Key Pizza. (As of press time, the winner had not yet been announced.) Tables are loaded to near-collapsing with tin pizza trays holding full pies, the negative space from pilfered pieces forming an army of Pac-Men around the perimeter of the ballroom. White slices, sauced slices, square slices, mushrooms, sausage, spinach. Pies with no cheese, pies with far more cheese than is necessary. Someone hands me a "surf and turf" slice with shrimp and cheesesteak meat on it. Every so often, I step out of the way of a young kid sprinting through the audience holding a stack of steaming boxes — reinforcements.

Drew Lazor

Options at the Pizzalympics

A lady named Dolores who's breathing on an oxygen tank grabs my forearm as I walk by her table; she insists one of the two City Pizzas competing is the best in show by far, and wants to make sure I tried their bacon-and-french-fry pie. (I already had; it ruled.)

I see Pizzalympics first-timers Marlo and Jason Dilks of SliCE, who, along with Frank and Mary Maimone of NoLibs' Rustica, stick out a bit more than they'd probably like to. Both parlors, as Frank puts it, "walk the razor's edge," offering unique-take pies in neighborhood settings that do takeout/delivery. (SliCE is known for its Trenton-inspired crackery crust and chunky sauce, while Rustica is all about fresh ingredients presented atypically.)

"I think they can co-exist," says SliCE's Jason of Philly's many pizza disciplines. "There's enough mouths out there to feed. I don't feel [as if] I'm at odds with Stella or Osteria. I'm a little different. I have my own little niche. I've created a little market for myself there."

Stella and Osteria certainly aren't here; neither is Zavino, or Tacconelli's, or hell, even Marra's. There is no talk of cornichones or flour blends or oven spring. But there are hundreds upon hundreds of heads in the house, and every single one of them is having fun. And every single one of them is munching on the same exact thing.

This is Philadelphia pizza, too.

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net) (@drewlazor)