Fuoco Apizza

🏆ELITE PIZZA ALERT🏆 Restored after a fire in 2021, Fuoco Apizza is one of the great comeback stories in the pizza biz. Oblong shaped, busting out of the box, hand-crafted, uniquely original, Connecticut coal fired pizza…this is anything but a cookie-cutter pie. A molten mess straight out of the oven, this pizza is a bit of a “2-Face,” with half the pie soaked in grease, not exactly aesthetically pleasing, needing a little extra time to settle. The texture contrast in the dough is absolutely dumbfounding. The crust is exceptional; remarkably crispy, spectacularly well done, charred to perfection, combined with a smokey flavor giving the crust alone a 9.9 rating. Conversely, the rest of the dough, particularly in the center of the pie, is shockingly soft and pitifully limp. Despite the lifeless texture, the taste is out of this world, similar to the flavor of the crust, just void of any crisp or crunch. There’s a dusting of flour underneath the pie, coating the undercarriage to prevent moisture but does not aid in the crispness, giving it a somewhat undercooked feel. However, the phenomenal taste tops the spineless texture, salvaging the score of the entire pie. If the rest of the dough were as crispy or even half as crispy as the crust, this would be a near-perfect pizza. Compared to the thinness of the dough, the cheese is a tad thickish. With a melty, oozy, gooey flow, and beautiful char, the cheese has a tremendous consistency to go along with a deliciously creamy taste and texture, similar to Modern Apizza’s quality shredded blend of mozzarella. Despite the vat of grease pooling up on the right side of the pie, the flavor of the cheese and sauce are unaffected. The excess oil just adds weight to an overall thin and relatively light pizza. The sauce is superb with fantastically fresh tomato flavor, zesty & zippy, sweet and tangy with lots of spice and kick, not too sweet, a beautifully balanced blend. All of the ingredients are outstanding, true quality from top to bottom. The only aspect holding this pizza back from the Hall of Fame 9s is the ultra soft, lifelessly limp and completely crunchless center of the pie, too significant to overlook. The absence of crisp leaves the pizza more chewy, having to tear each bite away. With such perfectly charred and crisped crust, it’s a total enigma as to why the middle is so soft and mushy; nevertheless, taste trumps texture in this case. The flavor alone makes this must-try, travel-worthy pizza, as good as any pie you’ll get in New Haven. In fact, a firmer, crispier center would launch this pizza into my top-3 all-time. Regardless of the texture, this is truly special, elite Connecticut pizza north of New Haven worth making a pilgrimage to try.