Pizzeria Mozza

I don't buy into all the hype of celebrity chefs. Sure, I know their names and recognize some of their faces, but I'm not going to throw my panties at them. Likewise, I don't rush out the door to try their new restaurants. But, I wanted to eat at Pizzeria Mozza for months now and not simply because its co-owned by Iron Chef Mario Batali and La Brea Bakery's Nancy Silverton but because that combination was reputed to have created some damn tasty pizza. So, for this stay in LA, I made reservations to eat there.

Our lunch reservation was for 3:15pm, the earliest they could seat us. Jeanne and I drove passed the valet parking for $8.50 and found a free spot on the street. Pizzeria Mozza is situated on the corner of Highland and Melrose, next to a suspiciously dumpy-looking house and across from an EZ Lube, and it felt appropriately LA. We walked through the large windowless doors, was greeted by a friendly hostess, and took a seat at one of the several empty tables.

The space was small and unpretentious, which was a nice surprise as I had feared the worst for a hip, LA restaurant. Our table setting was simple: a paper place mat with instructions on how to speak Italian without words and how to make a pizza margherita on top of which was a plate with a paper packet filled with our utensils. There was a wall of wine on one side of the restaurant and a bar that encompassed the yellow-tiled wood-fired oven on the other.

As we perused the menu, trying to narrow our pizza options from more than a dozen to just three, I felt my mouth water and my eyes grow large. I wanted to eat it all. There were too many options: rapini, cherry tomatoes, anchovies, olive, and chile; gorgonzola, fingerling potatoes, radicchio, and rosemary; clams, garlic, oregano, parmigiano, and pecorino. But, we settled on the Bianca with fontina, mozzarella, sottocenere, and sage, the Coach farm goat cheese, leeks, and scallions (we opted to go sans bacon), and the egg, guanciale, radicchio, escarole, and bagna cauda.

The Bianca came out first and its thick ring of crust made its way to the edge of the plate. The middle was a beautiful white combination of cheeses speckled with the green of sparsely placed sage leaves. I ripped apart one of the four slices, wondered if I should attack it with a knife and fork, and decided upon folding the slice in half and biting its drooping tip. It was decadent, dripped of warm oil, and left my fingers and lips glistening with grease. But it was good, especially the crust, which was unlike any that I'd tasted before. It was chewy and charred at spots, deeply flavorful without elbowing to be the star of the show, thin enough yet substantial, and hinted at the tang of sourdough. This was one pizza crust that I did not want to leave on my plate. A little bit of reading before the visit told me that Nancy Silverton thought that the dough was at its best around 3pm, so perhaps that 3:15 reservation worked to my favor.

The egg, guanciale, and radicchio pizza arrived next at our table. Like the Bianca, it had a sizable ring of crust and the toppings looked like a mesh of shredded bits with a circle of bright yellow in the center. I poked my fork into the egg yolk and smeared it across the slices. This pizza was better than the first. I couldn't pick out all the different flavors of the ingredients (except for the slight bitterness of the radicchio) because they worked so harmoniously together. And, it had the most amazing aroma.

By the time the goat cheese, scallion, and leek pizza arrived, we had almost nowhere to put it on our crowded little table. It looked like a garden of greenery with dabs of white cheese and whole roasted garlic cloves. I only had room for about half a slice of it, which I was happy for. This one tasted of grass. It was too leek-heavy. Perhaps the bacon would have made it magnificent.

And, we couldn't pass up dessert. I read about the butterscotch budino with caramel and sea salt beforehand and was then reminded of it as, waiting for the bathroom, saw a newspaper clipping declaring the budino a triumph. The little dish of pudding came with two tiny pinenut and rosemary cookies and a dollop of whipped cream. I dug my spoon in and was wowed. The pudding was creamy and smooth. As I let the sweetness coat my mouth, I could taste the salt crystals cutting into the saccharinity and slowly dissolve. I savored every spoonful and the end of the budino came too soon.

For my first experience at a hip, LA restaurant with celebrity chef names attached, it was quite pleasant. I walked out of Pizzeria Mozza deeply satisfied yet longing to try everything on the menu. Perhaps there was something to these celebrity chefs.