Pizza Review

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Pizza Review
Opened in 2007, this joint is run by brothers Mike & Anthony Muoio, whose family has been in the restaurant biz for over 45 years, including pizzerias in the Bronx and Mount Vernon, NY. I didn’t see a plain cheese pizza on their menu, so I opted for a Napoli pie, which is like a Margherita meets football pizza. I’m glad I didn’t ask for a plain pie cause this pizza is extraordinarily delicious, exploding with fantastic flavors. Aside from the usual dough, sauce & cheese components, they add pesto into the mix, which I don’t normally love but it really supercharges all of the flavors in the other ingredients. There’s hardly any grease festering but there is a fair amount off olive oil swimming atop the cheese. While the olive oil is much tastier than typical pizza grease, it’s rather detrimental to the texture of the pie; particularly affecting the center of the pizza. The excess olive oil makes it heavy, soggy and drippy, causing major floppage and minimizing the crisp. The dough more towards the crust is firm and crunchy with a dry undercarriage, unaffected by the heavy olive oil flow. However, the crust is more chewy than crispy, but very flavorful as some of the pesto bleeds onto the edges. Even though the dough is somewhat subpar in both texture and taste, the other flavors carry this pizza past the shortcomings of the dough. The cheese is made from whole milk mozzarella, not a shredded blend. Both creamy and tasty, the cheese is very similar to Margherita style fresh mozz. The pesto and olive oil blend marvelously with the flavor from the cheese. The sauce is mostly crushed California plum tomatoes; sweet and bursting with zesty flavor, the sauce has plenty of zip & zing enhanced by the pesto, olive oil and chopped garlic atop the pie. All of these ingredients work really well together creating a truly delicious symphony of flavors, bringing this pizza to life. A better quality dough along with a crispier center and less extra virgin olive oil could catapult the pie into the upper 8s and possibly sniff the hallowed halls of the 9s. As it stands, this is a uniquely delicious travel-worthy pizza, filled with phenomenal flavor that will drive your taste buds wild.
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