Pie in the Sky

You embark on a quest for the perfect pizza. What you find is the meaning of life.

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The Gourmets

After three days of nonstop pizza consumption, I can think of little else. At the video store, I consider renting Moonstruck, or maybe Mystic Pizza. Clearly, it’s time to cleanse the palate. I decide to hit a flurry of restaurants that serve artisan pizzas—carefully tended gardens of fresh ingredients in which you’re far less likely to find pepperoni than pepperoncini, which sounds Italian for “tiny pizza meats” but actually refers to peppers. Pizza Nea is among the newest of these upscale eateries. A sleek counterpoint to takeout joints, it’s sandwiched between funky shops on northeast Minneapolis’s newly trendy East Hennepin strip. Its pizzas contain things like fennel and sea salt. The place sounds like a spa. I decide I’d better bring along a food-savvy coworker.

She has the Margherita, the world’s original “classic” pizza, created in Naples for Italy’s queen and christened with her name. Its main ingredients—tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and basil—represent the red, white, and green of the Italian flag. “This is so minimalist. Not goo,” my colleague announces, then gushes about the crushed San Marzano tomatoes. “Sunny, fresh, it’s like a garden tomato that’s been smashed on your pizza. In a good way.”

I order the “white pizza,” having never had one before. “Where’s the sauce?” I ask when it arrives. My coworker shakes her head. “Oh, Tim. There isn’t any. That’s why it’s called white pizza.”

Oh.

It looks as if someone has emptied a bag of spinach on top of my prosciutto and mozzarella. “That’s arugula,” I’m told. Whatever it is, between its refreshingly bitter bite and the prosciutto’s salty snap, this pizza is as clean as the lines of Nea’s modern décor—and the best pizza I’ve tasted so far.

Up next is Bryn Mawr Pizza & Deli, located near the intersection of Cedar Lake Road and Penn Avenue in Minneapolis. It might not look exactly like a gourmet spot, but you can get pizza with sun-dried tomatoes—and what’s this? walnuts?—so, hey, I’m already expecting white tablecloths. Bryn Mawr isn’t easy to categorize or to find, since the sign outside says “Fast Freddie’s Pizza & Deli.”

Inside, punk music blares and vintage dresses are tacked to the walls. We order a Greek pizza featuring feta cheese and kalamata olives, and something unfortunately named the Plapo, with, yes, walnuts and sun-dried tomatoes. What we’re handed, though, is a veggie pizza and a Rosemary Bianca pizza, only we don’t figure it out until we’ve already dug in. When a car pulls up and the driver, carrying two pizzas back into the store, asks if we’ve gotten the right order, we realize what’s happened.

There are many ways this mix-up could have been prevented, but I’m left thinking that if we had a moratorium on new pizza toppings, new fusions, new Plapos, it wouldn’t have mattered. Sure, what we ended up devouring was so well-crafted, the Bianca’s artichoke hearts, goat cheese, and fresh rosemary so delectably balanced, that we hardly minded the swap. But this wasn’t true for the other guy. And that’s unfortunate. In an age of personalized TV programming on airplanes, how long before we can no longer bond over a single circular dough-and-sauce–based food, before we’re passing in the night, searching for the personal pizza that speaks uniquely to us? Because my ideal pizza just says this: eat me.

It is at Punch Neapolitan Pizza, in St. Paul’s Highland Park, that I realize I’m in over my head with the artisan stuff. Here, the walls glow as yellow as Mediterranean sunshine, and the waitresses—there were no male servers on the day I visited—all wear European soccer shirts. They also all seem 22, healthily tanned, and way too thin to be eating the house handouts. So I’m understandably bashful when one of them asks for my order and I can’t quite bring myself to say that I’d like the Palermo pizza, and I’d like it “wet.”

A wet pizza, according to the menu, is one that’s been steeped in olive oil and extra tomatoes, the way they apparently like it in Naples. (And where they undoubtedly have no problem asking for it.) I settle for saying “Neapolitan style,” though of course I’m now expecting, and maybe even hoping for, a tricolored scoop of ice cream. What arrives is pizza so lush—bursting with fresh tomatoes, and not too cheesy—that I decide pizza should be eaten no other way. If only I could ask for it.
Grease Job

I find myself e-mailing an Internet date, “Would you describe yourself as saucy or cheesy?” “Saucy,” she writes back. That’s good, I tell myself, but then I realize I no longer have any idea what I’m talking about. Attitude? Food? Atti-food?

My refrigerator has two boxes of leftover pizza in it. I have two more in the office fridge. One day, lacking time to prepare anything, I find myself eating pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This is not good.

In a 2002 study, conducted by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and published in the book Restaurant Confidential, pizza was found to be “a minefield of saturated fat, and not just from the sausage, ground beef, and pepperoni. Most pizzas have enough cheese to make a cardiologist order that second Jaguar.”

Pizza makers were quick to fire back. The president of Pizza Hut, which got the biggest bashing for its cheesy crusts, responded, “Americans love cheese—they ask us for more and more in our pizzas.”

No doubt this is true, but more and more, I needed this quest to end. I hit three old-school pizzerias in quick succession. Fat Lorenzo’s, near Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis, serves true pizza pies, practically an inch thick and said to weigh in at nearly five pounds; ours is swimming with sausage, pepperoni, and mushrooms—fork food, for sure. It’s almost too much; I feel myself getting tired after a couple pieces and bring most of it home. A few miles away, Jakeeno’s Pizza and Pasta, at 36th and Chicago, serves the thin-crust, basic variety. Jakeeno’s was opened in the 1970s by a former Bridgeman’s Ice Cream employee; the staff wore bow ties then, soda fountain–style. Now the pizzeria is run by the founder’s daughters. Both places feature giant murals. At Fat’s, as the locals call it, the artwork includes cherubs riding mushrooms and garlic cloves. I am puzzled by this image for days.

At Jakeeno’s, I eat anchovies for the first time. The salty fish blobs, hidden in the cheese but oh-so-conspicuous in the mouth, remind me of the old adage “Sex is like pizza. When it’s good, it’s really good. When it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.” Whoever said this never ate anchovies, the one thing that can screw up pizza (and probably sex, for that matter).

Finally, I hit Rocco’s on Randolph Avenue in St. Paul, a small takeout joint situated, ironically, next to a plus-size clothing store. I order a sausage pizza, and suddenly three young men emerge like Oompa Loompas and staff the kitchen. Another hops out of a delivery car, though I can’t believe he’s old enough to drive. The thin-crust pizza is cut into squares, and it’s topped with more sausage and cheese than I prefer, but the whole Rocco’s experience lacks only an Atari game console to remind me of after-school snacks at friends’ houses in my youth. This is background pizza, the kind that’s finished before you know it, like childhood itself.

Maybe It Was the Hemp

At a certain point (approximately 220 on the cholesterol scale), all pizza begins to taste the same. Thick, thin, wet, dry. Perhaps it really is more about the experience. I can’t bear hitting one more place, though, so I order in. Not that Galactic Pizza, which opened last year at 29th and Lyndale in south Minneapolis, is your typical delivery joint. Its slogan is “Pizza with a conscience”; as you might expect, organic ingredients are a big draw. The drivers pilot three-wheeled electric cars and dress like superheroes. Not Superman and his ilk, but characters of their own invention, such as Galactic Gal and Space Cowboy, complete with capes and silver boots. I create my own pizza, choosing hemp pesto sauce, button mushrooms, green onions, pepperoni, and mozzarella cheese.

Inside of 20 minutes, a young man in a helmet and red full-body spandex suit is standing at my door. He says his name is Superbooty.

I eat the entire pizza. We have a winner, I think. And then, my body swooning, I lie down on the bed. The room begins to spin, as if all the world is a pizza crust, slowly being tossed through the galaxy, and we are merely toppings.

Tim Gihring is a senior writer for Minnesota Monthly.