Impressions: Casanova Pizzeria

Casanova
1204 South Vista Ave.
Boise, ID 83705
(208) 331-3535

Somehow I found myself in Boise last week amidst temperatures cold enough to make me seriously consider purchasing a Hummer on the remotest chance it might contribute to global warming. My former Idahoan friends Kevin and Sarah Wilson recommended Casanova Pizzeria to me, and their recommendation was spot-on. You can read more about my visit over on Slice, but below you'll see a few more shots of the pizza than you'll see there. I apologize for the level of noise and general lack of quality in these photos, as Casanova has some of the dimmest lighting in any restaurant I've visited!

From top to bottom, these are shots of the Margherita, the Don Ho (essentially a Hawaiian with black olives), the Comet (pepperoni with garlic and tomatoes, easily the best pie of the lot, and that's a slice of it above), and the Mondo (their version of the Supreme).

All photographs by Adam Lindsley.

Impressions: Acropolis

Acropolis
500 Central Way
Kirkland, WA 98003
(425) 827-2727

(Photograph: Adam Lindsley)

Wrote a brief impression on the sausage and green peppers pizza over at Acropolis in Kirkland. Check it out on Slice!

Impressions: Giannoni's

Giannoni's
2600 SW Barton St. #C3
Seattle, WA 98126
(206) 935-1800

My review of Giannoni's in West Seattle is up! Head on over to Slice to check it out.

[Photo: Adam Lindsley]

The Return to Serious Pie

Finally made it back to Serious Pie to give it a second chance after the first underwhelming visit. My brother joined me despite the pouring rain, and together we tackled six of the eight mini-pizzas available on the Happy Hour menu. My overall reaction? More positive than the first visit, absolutely. I still don't hesitate to say this is not great pizza, though. Not yet.

Some thoughts:

1.) The crust still bugs me. It tasted a lot better this time around than it did before, but the underside is still caked with a thick layer of flour and cornmeal, so that when it enters your mouth, it flakes off and forms a kind of mush on your tongue. So bizarre, and not pleasant.

2.) The Margherita this time was a hundred times better than the one I ate on my first visit. There was an ample amount of shredded parmesan on top to provide the saltiness that was missing from the first Margherita, and the sauce was heavily herbed, whereas the first Margherita's was a flavorless red paste.

3.) I enjoyed the sausage and peppers pie on my first visit, and once again, it was the pizza of the night. Great fennel-spiked sausage and peppers that deliver just a hint of heat.

4.) Pumpkin and squash are not idea pizza toppings. Both aren't particularly strong in the flavor department, and the mushy texture just felt wrong in my mouth. We tried two pizzas with these gourds, the pumpkin with pork belly and the delicate squash with roasted garlic. Both needed the addition of the second topping.

5.) The truffle cheese and roasted mushroom pizza was surprisingly sweet, and light on flavor. The sweetness came from the cheese, overpowering the mushrooms. Nothing memorable.

6.) The most interesting pizza of the evening was the guanciale, soft egg, and Beacon Hill arugula pie. The egg was cooked through, which I appreciated, as I don't particularly enjoy runny whites. Tasted great, too. Nice fresh arugula, slightly peppery. The pizzaiolo was pretty stingy with the guanciale, though. It really needed that pork flavor to tie the other two toppings together.

In conclusion, it appears that Serious Pie is like many other pizzerias, in that consistency varies greatly from one day to the next. My first visit here was a massive disappointment. My second visit...not totally redeeming, but a vast improvement. If they could cut down on the pantry-full of flour and cornmeal inundating the bottom of the crust, they'd be taking another huge step in the right direction.

I apologize in advance for the quality of the photographs below; they weren't taken with my usual camera, and we were seated in the very back corner of the restaurant, which was darker than a black steer's tookus on a moonless prairie night.

Truffle Cheese & Roasted Mushrooms; Margherita

Delicata Squash & Roasted Garlic; Pumpkin, Pistachios, & Pork Belly

Sausage & Roasted Peppers; Soft Egg, Arugula, & Guanciale

Ristorante Picolinos - The Photos

Ristorante Picolinos

6415 32nd Ave NW
Seattle, WA 98107
(206) 781-8000

Hot off the presses: I am now the Seattle correspondent for Slice, the #1 pizza blog in the world and a site I often refer to here on This Is Pizza. I'll still contribute here from time to time (and I'll let you know via Twitter when I do), but the majority of my reviews will appear on Slice for the foreseeable future.

My first "professional" review? Ristorante Picolinos in the Ballard neighborhood. You can read the entire review over on Slice, but since they weren't able to use all of the photos I took, I'll display them for you right here.

All photographs by Adam Lindsley

Impressions: Mia's Pizzas

Mia's Pizzas

4926 Cordell Avenue

Bethesda, MD 20814

(301) 718-6427

(Photographs: Adam Lindsley)

After a nasty 24-hour battle with a debilitating virus sheared the schedule of my final days on the East Coast and pushed my available time to a minimum, my friend Christa and I made a mad dash toward Washington D.C. to check out as many sights as possible--and eat some pizza, naturally. I had hoped to cajole fellow pizza blogger, er, Pizzablogger, into joining us on the excursion, but time further slipped through my fingers at the conspiratorial hands of both Google Maps and the Maryland Department of Transportation.

This wasn't the first time Google Maps had failed me (see my recent trip to San Francisco), but trying to find my way to Mia's Pizzas in Bethesda with incomplete directions and the added frustration of MDOT's deplorable freeway signage meant the battle was over before it even began. At one point Christa and I encountered a split in the road and two signs indicating the highway continued down both offshoots, though we soon discovered this was completely false. We got off at the next exit--in Virginia--was forced to pay an exit toll, then got on the nearest onramp, paid another toll, and eventually navigated the convoluted route to Mia's.

Fuming, famished, we found the restaurant nearly empty at three in the afternoon and felt our spirits lighten a little at the welcome sight of the goldenrod-tiled wood-fired oven in the kitchen at the back. I dug into their Margherita ($12.95) hoping it would help me forget the mediocre pizza at Coal Fire I'd eaten a couple days prior, and while it didn't blow me away like I hoped it would, it still proved an overall step up. The sauce is a simple blend of crushed tomatoes spiced up with what I would guess to be ground red pepper, but it didn't have that punch of freshness that sauces from places like Delfina or Pizzeria Bianco deliver. In fact, it tasted quite similar to the ho-hum tomato sauce I make at home, a fact I mostly attribute to not finding good quality tomatoes. The mozzarella, fresh, didn't make much of an impression on me; it could have been better salted.

What managed to stand out, though, was the crust. On one hand, it's thick (about 1cm) and dense, quite doughy, without much airiness or spring to the crumb. On the other hand, it's very flavorful, yeasty, perfectly salted, and decently charred on the undercarriage. While I found the rest of the pizza just slightly above average, I came back to that crust again and again. Probably too bready for some, but I thought it made a great snack, even hours later. Think of a chewy, moist bagel smashed flat and you won't be far off. They even offer a Pizza Bone Dipping Sauce to dunk your end crusts into for a mere 95 cents, though I thought they were plenty flavorful on their own.

Also gracing our table was the Alsace ($12.95), which eschews the disappointing red sauce and mozzarella in favor of gruyere, parmesan, pancetta, caramelized onions, and thyme. It sounds rich--and it is--but those four ingredients are smartly chosen. The saltiness and fat of the smoky pancetta plays off the sugars in the soft caramelized onions like a symphony, offering a mature sweet/savory contrast. The gruyere, perhaps my favorite cheese, was not skimped on; its thickness rivaled that of the crust. Nutty and full-bodied, it provided an irresistible base for the other toppings to sink into. I'd like see it used more on pizzas. Our server offered to grate more parmesan over the finished pie, and we accepted. The additional sharpness was a welcome supplement to the already bold flavors on the Alsace, and I wish we had done the same for the Margherita.

Mia's is definitely onto something here in Bethesda. Certain aspects of the pies could be improved--the tomato sauce and mozzarella, namely--but the crust is delicious, and if they come up with a way to make the dough a little lighter and airier, they'll have something few will find fault with.

OVEN: Wood

RECOMMENDED: Alsace pizza