Pizza Review
🔥🪵🔥BEST WOOD FIRED PIZZA ALERT🔥🪵🔥 Opened in 2020, Luna serves some of the best wood-fired New Haven style pies in Connecticut. If this pizza looks strikingly similar to a Fuoco Apizza pie, that’s because the owners are brothers; and though I haven’t been to Christo’s in Wallingford, I believe a 3rd brother owns that joint. This is not the typical personal size Neapolitan style pizza you see with most wood ovens; and while not nearly as crispy as coal oven pizza, this slightly softer New Haven style pie still has that great smokey, off-the-charts char to go along with phenomenal flavor, despite straddling the line of well done & burnt, which mostly affects the thin & supremely crunchy crust. The middle of the pie is a smidge soggy & floppy due to the heavier amounts of cheese, sauce & grease that the thinnish dough cannot support. Even though the undercarriage is beautifully charred, it lacks crunch, firmness & backbone to provide a strong enough base to carry the other elements. Bearing an uncanny similar taste & texture to Fuoco and Modern Apizza’s cheese, this shredded mozzarella blend is top quality, delectably creamy with deliciously charred cheese bubbles. Super flavorful to go along with a wonderfully melty flow & consistency, the cheese is also smothered by grease, weighing down the pie with heavy excess oil. Likely caused by the butter fat in the cheese, the grease luckily doesn’t damage the flavor of any of the ingredients. Thick & hearty, the sauce is a chunky tomato blend, sweetish but a tad subdued. While I don’t believe the oil dulls the sauce, it’s missing some extra zip & zing. Perhaps just lacking in spices, the simplistic sauce lets the outstanding flavors of the dough & cheese do most of the talking. A little zest & tang could elevate this score into the upper 8s; and a firmer, crispier pie could skyrocket the rating into the elite 9s. Overall, this is still some of the best wood-fired New Haven style pizza north of the pizza capital. Pretty great as it is, a few adjustments such as jazzing up the sauce with some spices to give it a pinch of pizzazz and crisping up the pie to give it a firmer, crunchier base gives this place real potential to achieve Hall of Fame status. I’d really love to see what a coal oven could do for this pizza! But if you like wood-fired pies in the style of New Haven, this is certainly a travel-worthy destination.
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