Restaurants

Sazza

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Still, something about Sazza kept drawing me back. I might be stuck in my own pizza preferences, but I am also respectful (and occasionally envious) of those who are trying to do new things — and Jenni and Jeff were definitely trying. Every time I returned to their small, spare, brightly lit and très moderne, fast-casual-looking pizza joint, I saw that the menu had been changed, tightened. I saw the place when it was furiously busy — all the low, blond, recycled-wood tables and the high counter seats by the window taken by neighbors and families, the register backed up with people getting takeout. I also saw it when it was miserably quiet — just me, a green-chile enchilada pizza with cilantro, a glass of biodynamic wine and Jeff behind the counter, staring forlornly out through the glass. I saw that Jenni and Jeff were cudgeling their dream into a slow-growing maturity that was being dearly purchased, month by month, lesson by lesson.

Once the kitchen got its legs, for example, the crusts were fine — a perfect thickness, a perfect blend of stiff, stone-charred bottom to soft, yielding top. In particular, they were good on the eight-inch personal pizzas, which is tough to pull off because those things burn in half a second if not watched very carefully by someone who knows just when to pull them. Additionally, Sazza kept working until it got the four-cheese mix right. Its blend has mozzarella and provolone as well as romano and parmesan — generally a sin of damning proportion, because those last two cheeses often come together to taste and smell like a foot. But the kitchen uses fresh, real romano and parmesan, not the crap in the little cans, so that rather than add a footy flavor, they merely lend a sting of saltiness and sourness balanced by the mozzarella and provolone. On other pies, the kitchen uses gruyère — an underappreciated pizza cheese (like emmenthaler) that works well as long as it's paired with an equal or greater amount of mozzarella.

Over the months, I watched Sazza pull other things together. The first time I'd had the French onion pizza, it was terrible. Yes, there was gruyère, but it was smothered with caramelized onions that were barely browned, bitter with the flavor of scorched garlic. A few weeks later, though, the same pizza was excellent — a smart and controlled transposition of flavors from the soup crock to the pie, lightly touched with garlic oil, spread thinly with shaved and properly caramelized onions that'd settled gently into their bed of milky, soft cheese. And all of a sudden, I no longer needed several beers and a side of chicken wings just to be in the same room with a barbecued-chicken pizza dotted with chunks of pineapple. At Sazza, I even kind of liked it — though I justified that by determining that the inclusion of slivered red onion and a light touch of barbecue sauce balanced the slick, wet sweetness of the fruit and made the combination work.

There are still problems: The basil pesto on the white pizza remains inedibly bad (too strong, too punch-in-the-face forward and used in too great a quantity to be balanced by a simple slice of tomato and a jacket of mild cheese); the pepperoni used by the kitchen tastes like fried baloney (not a bad thing, necessarily, but not something I want on my pizza); and I still want to cry a little for my lost youth when I see a menu listing garlic-shot cheeseburger pizza with ketchup and lettuce. But while Sazza is not yet a great pizza joint, it's fought its way through all my prejudices to become a solidly good one.

Last week, I stopped in alone on a quiet night and ordered the winter seasonal special: a purple-potato pizza made with Peruvian purple mountain potatoes, sliced thin as paper, touched with cracked black pepper and laid across a bed of cheese studded with roasted chicken, sliced apples and bacon. I meant to eat one slice, but then had two, then three. There was something about the combination of the potato starch, the sweet apple, the savory chicken and the balance of flavors against the weight of the crust. The bacon didn't hurt, either. But what surprised me most was that, far from raging against this kind of thing — about as far from the pizzas of my childhood as could possibly be imagined — I actually found myself enjoying it.

What's more, I found myself looking forward to the next bite. And the next and the next.

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