In LOS ANGELES. A FUNNY thing happened on Nancy
Silvertons way to opening a new Italian restaurant here. Actually, a
doughy, cheesy, wonderful thing happened, and neither she nor
Looking for the
right spot for her restaurant, she homed in on one that happened to have a
pizzeria attached to it. And it hit her: pizzas. She should do pizzas herself.
She should do them in this annex, next to the rest of her operation, because
the space was already set up that way, with the right kind of wood-burning oven
right where an oven should be.
Her restaurant, Osteria Mozza, would be the star.
Its scrappy sibling, Pizzeria Mozza, would lend
amusing support. That was the idea.
This is the
reality: Osteria Mozza,
after extensive construction and repeated delays, still isnt
open. July, Ms. Silverton promises, but does it matter?
Pizzeria Mozza began serving lunch and dinner in November and became
so madly popular and widely revered that food lovers in Los Angeles and
elsewhere stopped asking when, oh when, Ms. Silvertons proper restaurant
would be ready.
Instead they
asked how, oh how, they could land a table at her pizza joint.
It accepts
reservations up to a month in advance and pretty much books up a month in
advance. Some entertainment-industry bigwigs have their secretaries set up a
reservation a week, while others sidestep the craziness and crowds by doing
takeout. When I spoke to Ms. Silverton on the phone recently, she said that she
had made a to-go order for Jeffrey Katzenberg
early that day and one for Steven Spielberg
later on. She sounded exhausted and, well, baffled.
Its a small, little, loud restaurant, right? she said, adding that she never, ever, ever, ever
expected this kind of reaction.
The instant and
outsize swoon over Mozza owes something to the
reputation she made for herself at La Brea Bakery and the restaurant Campanile.
Its fueled by the long-distance involvement of the New York chef Mario Batali and his frequent collaborator, Joseph Bastianich, who are partners in Mozza,
their first West Coast venture.
And it reflects
the spread of a certain kind of haute pizza culture across the country. In
growing numbers, serious chefs and bakers are making and the food cognoscenti are devouring exemplary pies inspired at least loosely
by the thin-crust pizza of
You can find them
in
The newspaper
awarded the pizzeria a head-turning three out of four stars under the headline:
Hot spot? Mozza is on fire.
To get into Mozza on a recent night, I booked about three weeks ahead
and had to accept a 5 p.m. dinner reservation: anything at a saner hour was
long gone. Mozza is open daily from noon to midnight,
and when I arrived it was two-thirds full.
By
5:45, there wasnt an empty seat. By 6:30, the area just
inside the door was jammed with people waiting for one of 40 reserved spots at
tables or one of 20 counter perches half at a wine bar, half facing the pizza
oven that are distributed on a
first-come-first-served basis.
As my friends and
I worked our way through several rounds of antipasti, I noticed a woman with
tiger-stripe pants and a beehive hairdo just a few tables away. Then I noticed
her pizza, which managed to make an even more compelling visual statement, its
crust a veritable topography of canyons and buttes. John Ford could have shot a
miniature Western on one of Ms. Silvertons pies.
The woman and I
swapped smiles, a familiar wordless exchange between two food adventurers
thrilled to be exploring a coveted frontier. She held my gaze as she lifted a
slice of pizza and took a bite. Then, after a slow-motion, self-consciously
dramatic chew or two, she nodded and flashed me an O.K. sign. The
pizza passed muster.
Ill say. Ms. Silverton, who started her career as a pastry
chef and is an accomplished baker, makes crusts with extraordinary character:
softly chewy in spots, crisply charred in others, ever so faintly sweet, even
more faintly sour. Theres some rye flour in her dough and some malt, and
she lets it sit for 36 hours before she uses it.
Although not
conventionally thick, her crusts are denser and weightier than the Neapolitan
ideal, reflecting her stated love of the pizza bianca sold by several bakeries around Campo de Fiori in
The obsessive
attention that Ms. Silverton and her peers pay to dough and crusts is part of
what separates their pies from the trailblazing pizza that came out of the
wood-fired ovens at Spago more than two decades ago.
Their pies are also being baked in smaller or more exactingly designed ovens
that reach 900 degrees. Two minutes or less and theyre
done.
Ms.
Silvertons pies take nearly four minutes, and her oven temperature is
about 700 degrees, she said. She said she has determined that thats
whats best for her dough, which she described as unusually strong, due to
the way she hydrates and folds it during those 36 hours.
And the oven, in
the end, isnt the one she inherited from the
pizzeria that preceded hers. She said that Mr. Batali
had realized quickly that, from a commercial standpoint, she would need
something bigger something just
like the terra-cotta Italian import in the backyard of his northern
So they got one
of those ovens, with a front of yellow tiles, for Mozza.
The 10 diners at the counter that faces it, along with diners elsewhere who
have a view of it, tend to stare at its fiery mouth as the pies go in and out.
Its as if theyre witnessing sacrifices to a tempestuous god, and
their hushed, rapt focus is a tidy illustration of food fetishism today.
Although Ms.
Silverton is fixated on dough, she doesnt
ignore the balance of the pizza. The toppings for each of roughly 15 kinds of
pies have well-chosen, well-balanced ingredients: meaty fennel sausage, creamy
buffalo milk mozzarella, expertly cured meats.
Most of the Mozza devotees I spoke to favor the pizza with fennel
sausage and red onion. I was partial to one with mixed mushrooms, fontina, taleggio and thyme, and to another with salame,
mozzarella, tomato and hot chilies. The latter tasted like an elegant, electric
riff on a traditional pepperoni pie.
While Ms.
Silvertons pizza isnt flawless, and while
the crusts of a few of the pies had rims so monstrously broad they muscled the toppings out of the picture, I had terrific
meals at Mozza. And thats partly because of what
Mozza serves, without much fanfare, in addition to
pizza. Its salads and antipasti were fantastic.
A dish that
placed shreds of slowly braised lamb shank, olives and capers over creamy
polenta was salty, rustic bliss. Fried squash blossoms had a light, crisp shell
that underscored the creaminess of the ricotta and mozzarella inside them.
But the most
delightful wedding of crunchy and gooey came courtesy of Mozzas
arancine, deep-fried risotto balls without any of the
greasiness to which these fritters often fall prey.
I was also wild
about a bruschetta with a mash of chicken livers,
capers and guanciale. But Mozza
reached perhaps its loftiest peak toward the end of each meal, when its
butterscotch budino, a pudding to shame all other
puddings, arrived.
Mozza veterans had told me not
to miss it. They should have told me to take only tiny bites of everything
beforehand so that I would have room for a second budino
and maybe a third. The budinos
simple master stroke? Over the pudding hovers a thin layer of caramel
with an audaciously generous sprinkling of sea salt. You show me a compulsively
eatable dessert, Ill show you a salty one.
Pizzeria Mozza is, when you add all of its components together, a
serious and impressive restaurant in its own right. Its all-Italian wine list
has principles: without a single Chianti, Barolo or brunello
on it, diners are prodded to try less familiar wines, and theres not a
bottle over $50.
With that
adventurous wine list, red and gold colors and focus on pizza and small plates,
Mozza struck me as a less sprawling, much sharper
version of Otto in
But the makers of
Mozza werent focused
on pizza at the start. Ms. Silverton envisioned a restaurant devoted to
mozzarella (hence the name), and Mr. Batali and Mr. Bastianich wanted a part of it. Then they took a digression
that turned into a destination. Its a movie-style twist,
befitting Mozzas location on the edge of