Piccino

Carlo started working at a new restaurant Piccino about a month ago. I had been hearing talk of it, all of which came from Colin and Eleanor since it’s co-owned by Colin’s dad’s wife, and wanted to pay a visit. But, because it only serves lunch (no dinner yet) Mondays through Fridays, getting there would be tough. I started to plot sick days, long lunches, half days, fake doctor’s appointments, anything to be able to eat there some time between the hours of 11:30AM and 3PM. But, thanks to the holiday that is Martin Luther King Jr. Day (god bless his soul), I got my chance. Shari picked me up, and I took my directions (no thanks to Google Maps) and we drove out to the Dogpatch.

Piccino is a bright blue place with a cheery façade and large windows on the corner of 22^nd and Tennessee. We stepped inside and were warmly welcomed. I was surprised at how small Piccino was. It looked like it could hold no more than 15 people and even those seats were placed snuggly next to each other. Shari and I chose a small table next to the bar and under the coffee menu.

There are only four people who run the show at Piccino. There’s Carlo, Margherita (she’s Colin’s dad’s wife), Margherita’s sister, and the tall, gray-haired Blue Bottle Coffee Man (at my last visit to the Blue Bottle garage-door stand on Linden the gray-haired man was not to be found and three people who I had never seen there before were making my latte and cappuccino; I now know where he’s gone). And, it makes for very unique and charming service. The Blue Bottle Coffee Man handed us our menus from behind the coffee bar and told us to “holler” with our order when we were ready. I’ve never had to holler my order over a coffee bar before in all my dining experience, and if it was someone other than the Coffee Man with his gray locks covering his eyes and his nice smile that reveals teeth adorned with braces I might not have so charmed. But, I hollered away, “We’d like the Piccino Special and the Margherita pizza please.”

As we waited for our food, we watched Carlo bring out dishes to the other tables and greet other friends. I felt like a spy watching him without him knowing that we were there but I wasn’t about to yell out his name while he was at work. And, he noticed us anyhow and said hello. He then brought out a cauliflower and radicchio salad with raisins, pine nuts, and balsamic vinaigrette along with a small dish of green olives. The salad was spicy from the radicchio, sweet from the raisins, and slightly tangy from the vinaigrette, and delicious as a combination. And, those olives were amazing—subtly salty for olives, tender, and not heavy on the tongue.

Shortly after, Margherita’s sister brought out the first of our pizzas. The Piccino Special has a white cheese of some sort that wasn’t mozzarella (I can’t remember what and feel that if I guess wrongly I may cause offense), Meyer lemon, and arugula. It was an interesting combination but one that worked. The thin, crisp crust was barely topped with the toppings but there was no need for a heavy-handed onslaught. The cheese, lemon, and arugula acted not as the stars of the dish but as equal players with the crust, and there was something remarkably fresh about the flavors that needed neither further adornment nor piles of excessiveness. In a world filled with Extreme Pizza, subtlety has become a lost art form but it seems like it is being well appreciated at Piccino.

Our tiny table was full already when Margherita came out next with the pizza which shares her name. She asked if we were Eleanor’s friends and introduced herself with a firm shake of a flour-dusted hand. We looked at the pizza in her hand, then to our table, back to the pizza, and then up at her. There was no space for the pizza on our tiny table, so she placed our pizza just an arm’s reach away on the bar. The women on the other side of the bar eyed our pie, which made me nervous. Shari and I needed to stake a claim to that pizza, so we piled it on top of our other one and took a slice. Once again, the pizza was remarkably simple—cheese, sauce, and crust—and delicious. The sauce was fresh and tasted of sun-ripened tomatoes, the crust crisp, and the cheese just chewy enough.

As if that wasn’t enough, Carlo then appeared again with a plate carrying a small round sandwich of some sort. I’d never called a sandwich cute before, but this was definitely a cute-looking sandwich with pieces of green sticking out from the sides, white sauce oozing from a hole in the golden baked dough (I can’t quite call it bread), and pink-tinged roast beef inside. And, not only was it a cute sandwich, but a tasty one too, and one that I gladly ate up. The dough was crunchy, the beef tenderly soft, and the sauce salty and tangy. If only all roast beef sandwiches could be made with such love.

We cleared our plates (something we didn’t expect to accomplish) and ordered cappuccinos. It’s nice knowing that because the Blue Bottle Coffee Man is there making Blue Bottle Coffee, our coffee needs would be taken care of and expertly so.

It was four o’clock when we left. We had arrived before two. Somehow two hours just slipped away easily eating pizza. But, as if Piccino was telling us that we had left too soon, Carlo called me to say that Shari had left something behind. You would never get such good lost-and-found service anywhere. So, we turned around and headed back to the bright blue building on the corner.