These days, it seems everyone wants a piece of the pie: Fresh pizza is not only rolling into non-pizzerias coast to coast (think quick-serve sandwich shops and grocery stores), it’s also taking on fresh toppers and sauces as part of a Renaissance in specialty pizza.
“At the end of the day, pizza is a food that everybody understands. It’s part of the American diet. It’s fun. And that’s why there’s interest in inventing and reinventing pizza,” says Scott Cohen, executive chef at two San Antonio, Texas, restaurants, Las Canarias at Omni La Mansion del Rio Hotel and Pesca on the River at the Watermark Hotel.
Quick-serve restaurants like Subway, Dunkin’ Donuts, Cosi, and Panera have launched or are testing pizzas—some are traditional while others are fancy or ethnic. Meanwhile, pizza chains are rolling out new dessert and specialty pizzas and installing high-speed ovens to compete more effectively with drive-thrus. “There are so many outlets selling fresh pizza, it’s becoming omnipresent,” says food expert Joyce Weinberg, president of New York Food Tours and Events.
Several trends have intersected to create this perfect little storm for the beloved pizza pie. For one, it’s an ideal artisan-style food, as well as a perfect host for trendy organic and local foods, from corn to eggplant. And for the health-conscious, as with sandwiches, diners can get protein, veggies, dairy, grains, and carbs all in one. And pizza works for a variety of diners—especially the pickiest of eaters, the kids, which is a big part of some chains’ decision to add it to menus. It’s economical, and it can be easily made with existing equipment and ingredients, in many cases. Pizza can dress up very easily with high-end meats, veggies, fruits, cheeses, and herbed crusts. And it can be topped in ways that work for people on special diets, like vegetarians.
“Americans crave carbs and as you know, we crave convenience above all else,” Weinburg says. “Pizza can be eaten sitting or standing up and even while walking (as every New Yorker knows.) Moms like to serve their families pizza because, unlike most sandwiches, it’s hot, so moms feel like they’re serving their family a relatively healthy square meal if they put a specialty pizza on the table. Most men and kids will eat cooked veggies on a pizza—not so if they’re on a plate by themselves.”
Weinburg—who gives restaurant and pizzeria tours in pizza-loving New York City—first noticed the specialty pizza resurgence about three years ago in The Big Apple, and now it’s full steam ahead. There’s even a Connecticut caterer who only does pizza, driving his Big Green Truck to parties and making pizzas on the spot in a wood-fired oven.
Part of what’s driving the specialty-pizza trend is the resurgence of artisan or handmade foods throughout the U.S., something that, applied to pizza, Weinburg calls pizza rustica, an industry in itself. “People are discovering that the old way of doing things—using premium fresh ingredients, hand tossing dough, using a real wood-fired or coal-fired oven—produces a warm, deliciously scented restaurant and the best pizza product,” she says.
New pizzerias, which are easier to open and require less staffing than fuller-menu restaurants, are cropping up everywhere in a town that’s already pizza-saturated, she says. Such New York restaurants as Pinch on Park Avenue sell pizza by the inch. Others sell by the pound (versus the slice or pie), following in the Italian tradition of pizza by the meter, a practice that delivers more rectangular or square (taglio) than triangular slices.
Others, like L’asso, are making thin-crust pizzas the Old World way, to strict Italian standards. Some of the traditional-style specialty pizzerias rely on simple traditions from Naples, Italy, “wonderful extra-virgin olive oil, using great flour specifically for pizza dough, using Santa Marzano tomato sauce, fresh basil, fresh pesto, and, of course, fresh mozzarella cheese, preferably real buffalo mozzarella, made from the milk of water buffalos from Italy,” Weinburg says. Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan sells traditional Roman-style pizza: handmade dough covered with olive oil and fresh mushrooms, leeks or zucchini—and no cheese.