Does Ƶ need another style of pizza?
A more pressing question: Is there actually a category of pizza you couldn’t already find in the area?
At Napoli Bros. Pizza and Pasta, which opened in May in Chesterfield, the answer to both questions is yes, emphatically. Napoli Bros. claims to be — and to the best of my knowledge, at least, is — the only Ƶ restaurant featuring coal-fired pizza in the manner of New Haven, Connecticut.
This isn’t simply a change in fuel from a wood-burning oven. There is no flickering hearth here, no campfire smoke. The coal oven hulks in a back corner of the Napoli Bros. dining room, a gleaming beast kept separate from the kitchen proper, blistering thin-crust pies at 550 degrees.
As you might have guessed from the Napoli Bros. name, one of the region’s best-known restaurant families has imported New Haven-style pizza here: the Pietosos, owners of Cafe Napoli in Clayton and its spinoffs Napoli 2 in Town and Country and Napoli III and Napoli Sea in St. Charles. (Another Napoli Group restaurant is slated to open this fall in Kirkwood.) Their new restaurant occupies one of the former outlet-mall storefronts reinvented as the District of Ƶ entertainment venue.
People are also reading…
Kye Pietoso, son of Cafe Napoli founder Tony Pietoso, told me in a phone interview that, on the ever-contentious subject of pizza, his whole family can agree on liking the New Haven style. If not for the practical considerations, I would wonder why New Haven pizza hadn’t become a hit here years ago. When I say this crust is thin, I don’t just mean thinner than, say, a New York-style pie. Take away its char-freckled lip, and you might mistake the Saltine-crisp crust for Ƶ-style.
Chef Anthony Gitto has been tweaking the dough’s recipe since before the restaurant opened. He loses sleep over it, Kye Pietoso said. (Speaking of prominent Ƶ restaurant families, Gitto is the son of Charlie Gitto Jr. of Charlie Gitto’s on the Hill.) The crust, though thin, holds its structure under a reasonable number of toppings, and the chew of the compact lip yields a pleasantly mild bready flavor.
You can build your own pie — and will need to do so if you prefer a simple cheese pizza or one with cup-and-char pepperoni. The menu’s own selection leads, fittingly, with the Napoli Bros. pizza: pepperoni, sausage, pancetta and caramelized onion on a base of tomato sauce and mozzarella. This might exceed the load capacity of the crust — the slices of my order drooped at the end — but it makes for a fine meat lover’s pie, with just enough sweetness from the onion to soften the pork trio’s spices.
The Napoli Bros. was my favorite of the pizzas I tried here, but two other pies might provide a better introduction to the New Haven style. The white pizza scatters what, at a glance, looks like a bushel of clams on a bed of mozzarella (with no sauce). A hint of both rosemary and lemon zest perfumes the pizza, and every now and then you can taste the caramelized onions among all the seafood, but this is not a pie for anyone less than enthusiastic about clams.
The tomato pie is the most straightforward New Haven pizza: crust, a thin layer of tomato sauce and grated Pecorino Romano. The cheese retains its signature tanginess and saltiness as it bakes, but it isn’t the pie’s dominant flavor. That would be the herbaceous blast of oregano in the sauce. You haven’t tasted this much oregano since the first baggie of weed you bought in high school. That’s not a complaint. About the pizza, I mean.
I said the white and tomato pies might introduce you to New Haven pizza. A critic should admit his limitations. I visited New Haven for one evening many years ago, in another lifetime. I did see a Tool cover band play inside a mostly empty bar. I did not eat any pizza. For me, what Napoli Bros. serves works as pizza, with good ingredients smartly assembled. Gitto and his kitchen team should dial in the nuances — a stronger note of rosemary and lemon on the clam pizza, more deeply caramelized onion where that is a featured topping — but this pizza is both different from what Ƶ already offers and a welcome addition to our many (many) pizzerias.
The Napoli Bros. menu sprawls beyond pizza, with the expected appetizers (toasted ravioli, fried calamari) and even a few dishes borrowed from the Pietosos’ other restaurants. Having written about both Napoli III and Napoli Sea in recent years, I passed on most of the familiar fare. But I returned twice specifically for the pasta dishes Gitto himself has brought to the restaurant, like pillowy gnocchi in an exceptionally creamy cacio e pepe sauce and agnolotti plump with braised beef in a silken brown-butter sauce festooned with whole sage leaves and slivers of prosciutto.
In its first two months, Napoli Bros. has already proved adaptable. The original menu listed its chicken wings, another appetizer, as coal-fired. The dish didn’t work, Pietoso told me. By the time I ordered them, Gitto had switched to a more traditional fried preparation. Still, these wings stand out thanks to the prickly seasoning of their dry rub and two dipping sauces, a sharply tangy and very buttery buffalo sauce and a dill-forward ranch dressing.
No, Ƶ probably didn’t need one more place to get wings, but these will do nevertheless.