Mount Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii in A.D. 79 (C.E.?), and it looms over the city of Naples, still active. The government of Campania is even paying its citizens to move away from the volcano, hoping to reduce the damage from the next eruption. We’ve got our own volcano, but it’s been 150 years since an eruption, long before Seattle was a major city, and when Rainier breaks out of the clouds, it seems so calm that we think of it as icy, not fiery. And this, I think, is why so many Seattle pizzas fall short. In Naples, birthplace of pizza, they’ve learned to live with fire. We haven’t.
It’s an extremely hot oven that makes a pizza worthwhile, that coaxes out a nutty, crisp–but not too crisp–crust. A few places in town have done well by the crust (for example, Cafe Lago in Eastlake and La Vita é Bella in Belltown), but for the most part, we’re content to gum down a spongy, thin version of focaccia and call it good.
So I was excited to hear that Joe Fugere, a former Starbucks executive, went to Naples to learn from the people of the fire, and then came back to start a Columbia City pizzeria. He founded Tutta Bella Neapolitan Pizzeria on the principles of the Verace Pizza Napoletana Association, a pizza guild with rigid preservationist guidelines: only low-gluten Italian flour, only San Marzano tomatoes, only wood-fired ovens. In a few months a pizza inspector will come from Italy, and, if all goes well, give Fugere the right to hang the association’s sign. The corner of Rainier and Hudson will for all intents and purposes become a branch office of Naples.
Neapolitan-style pizzerias are built around two canonical, thin-crusted, individual-sized pies: the austere Regina Margherita ($5.95), with tomato sauce, basil, and islands of fresh mozzarella, and the even more austere marinara ($5.95), with tomato sauce, garlic, and herbs–no cheese at all. If the crust weren’t so good at Tutta Bella, these pizzas might seem dour, but the searingly hot oven (800-1,000¡F) makes their bottoms crisp and throws up a tender berm of crust around the toppings.
While I like a purist project as much as the next girl, I still hanker for a little embellishment like, say, cheese (provolone, Asiago, and fontina are shredded into the house mix), plus the fennel, red pepper, and artichokes on the Quattro Stagioni ($7.50), or the mushrooms and salami mingling together on the Pizza Antica ($7.95). Even a little too much char didn’t keep my friends and me from scarfing them down. Better still was the Pancetta e Pomodoro ($6.95), with whisper-thin ruffles of pancetta and marinated mushrooms, and the fantastic yellow tomato sauce that is deployed on the pizzeria’s porkier products. This lush texture is as close as I’ll get, for now, to the lardo pizza I’ve been dreaming about–the one served at Mario Batali’s New York pizzeria, Otto–a pizza covered with melting slices of house-cured fatback.
In between bites, I sucked down a Moretti pilsner ($3.95), pale yellow and un-exotic, but perfectly equipped to cut through the rich pizza cheese. The mild romaine salad ($8.95 for a large) was unassuming, but it had little land mines of excitement mixed in: here a cherry tomato, there a sweet shaving of fennel, a wad of soft mozzarella.
The most electrifying pizza came to me by a fluke. When I called to find out when the restaurant was open, an amiable woman named Renee recommended I order the breakfast pizza, which sounded like a horrifying Cinnabon invention, but Renee set me straight: “It’s got our yellow sauce and rosemary ham,” she said, “and we crack an egg on top.” When we got to the restaurant, it wasn’t on the menu, but I ordered it anyway.
The counterwoman blanched, worried, perhaps, that we’d be upset by the pizza’s soft-cooked egg.
“Renee told me about it,” I protested.
And with that, a short woman with a brush of silver hair heard her name and said she’d be delighted to make us a breakfast pizza ($6.95). Minutes later, it came to the table with the egg yolk already pierced by the pizza blade. We dipped our slices in the oozy yellow sauce, and giggled at our good fortune.