The New California Pizza Kitchen

And then there is the lardo pizza. Lardo di Colonnata is a traditional meat from the snow-white quarries of Carrara, chunks of back fat cut from the local pigs and cured for months in special basins hewn from marble. When it is ready, you slice the lardo thin and melt it into grilled bread. When lardo is available — the house-cured stuff supposedly won’t come online until next fall, and the only decent American stuff is hard to procure — the lardo is draped over smoking-hot pizza crusts instead of hot bread: gently oily, scented with fresh rosemary, tasting totally, powerfully of pig.

You can ignore my blissed-out ravings — my wife co-wrote a baking book with Silverton, and Nancy has been a close family friend for many years — but you would be missing out on the best pizza ever to be baked in Los Angeles. And I’m not raving about every single item. The arancine, fried pingpong balls of rice with gooey molten-cheese centers, may be more refined at Angeli Caffe down the street. Tart, cured white anchovies are better in salad, I think, than they are on a pizza, where the smack of vinegar is a little obtrusive. And I have tasted the pizza that inspired Silverton’s with fennel sausage and cream, from Pellicano, an amiable dive near Castiglione del Lago in western Umbria. In Mozza’s version, bombed with industrial quantities of wild-fennel pollen, the cream tends to disappear into the crust rather than setting into a kind of custard, and the nuggets of sausage, while superb on their own, tend to roll off the pizza like marbles. Silverton’s boyfriend, Michael, gets around the fennel onslaught and rollover effect by ordering the sturdier pizza bianca with sausage — a fine call.

Mozza meals: Silverton at her pizza station. (Photos by Anne Fishbein)

The pizza bianca. Try it with sausage. (Photos by Anne Fishbein)

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More About

• Nancy Silverton
• Mario Batali
• Matt Molina
• Fruits and Vegetables
• Foods

What comes across most at Mozza is how obsessed Silverton and Molina are with the details. The dish listed on the menu as Nancy’s chopped salad, which is basically your neighborhood pizzeria’s antipasto — garbage salad, it’s sometimes called — has been reinterpreted by a chef with access to the world’s best ingredients: slivered organic lettuce with shreds of artisanal salami and buttery aged provolone, garnished with beautiful poached chickpeas instead of the sour canned garbanzo beans, tossed with a tart vinaigrette flavored with flecks of pungent Greek oregano crumbled to order from a dried sheaf of the stuff. It is a garbage salad, most profoundly and in every particular, but raised to a new level. I can’t wait for the osteria. If Molina and Silverton can do this much for garbage salad, what will they do with pigeon, truffles and spaghetti carbonara?

Pizzeria Mozza, 641 N. Highland Ave., L.A., (323) 297-0101. Open noon–mid. daily. Full bar ($20 corkage). Valet parking. AE, MC, V. Dinner for two, food only, $26–$70. Recommended dishes: chicken-liver crostini; fried squash blossoms with ricotta; duck leg with lentils (Tuesdays only); pizza with burrata, squash blossoms and tomato; lardo pizza; pizza bianca with sausage; butterscotch budino.