Where to Eat ... PIZZA Now

PIZZERIA MOZZA It is almost impossible to have a civil discussion about pizza in this city of immigrants, because there may be no foodstuff so intimately linked to one’s sense of identity. But in the wood oven at Pizzeria Mozza, Nancy Silverton has more or less reinvented the very idea of pizza, airy and burnt and risen around the rim, thin and crisp in the center, neither bready in the traditional Neapolitan manner nor wispy the way you find pizza in the best places in Tuscany. The crust is sweet and bitter, salty and chewy, circled by crunchy charred bubbles. Every pizza at Mozza is a unique marriage of flour, salt and hot-burning almond wood, stretched into irregular discs, as individually lovable as children. The crust is so good, in fact, that it may be at its best dressed with nothing more than a drizzle of good olive oil and a few grains of sea salt — though it’s not sad to eat topped with burrata and vivid squash blossoms, taleggio and house-made sausage, lardo and rosemary. or pureed anchovies and fried egg. (The mandatory caveat applies here: Silverton is a family friend.) This isn’t the pizza you used to eat back in Jersey, and that, perhaps, is the point. 641 N. Highland Ave., L.A., (323) 297-0101. Daily noon-mid. Parking: Valet. Beer/Wine. Italian, Modern European, Pizza. JG $$$

RIVA Thierry Perez and Jason Travi’s Riva, in a formerly cursed location just off the Santa Monica Promenade, translates Fraîche’s grape-friendly, farmers market-powered cooking into Italian — roasted quail and braised lamb neck, housemade testa and an aquarium’s worth of crudo, the sashimi-like Italianate raw fish preparations whose popularity is actually spreading from the United States back into Italy. Even in a city saturated with new pizza concepts, Travi’s pies have found a niche — crusts thin and pliable as shirt cardboard, bottoms annealed shiny and black by the heat of the brick oven, and sparingly topped with things like tomato and buffalo mozzarella, fluffy little meatballs, or a concoction of potatoes and Fontina cheese that sounds as if it would be something like a crackly Mozza creation but turns out to resemble a custardy French gratin. The drinks list is well-conceived — I loved a cocktail made with cucumber and the Italian bitters called Aperol. And Riva is open every night until midnight, which is no small thing in this early-closing corner of town. 312 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 451-7482. Open daily, 11:30 a.m.-mid. Parking: Valet. Full bar. Italian, Pizza. $$

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Zelo Gourmet Pizzeria

328 E. Foothill Blvd.
Arcadia, CA 91006

Category: Restaurant > Italian

Region: Foothill Cities

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More About

• Christiano Bollini
• Bottega Louie
• Jason Travi
• Eating Out
• Main Dish Recipes

SPARK WOODFIRE GRILL If live-fire cooking is like sex, the kitchen at Spark Woodfire Cooking is its peepshow, a glassed-in wonderland of shooting flames, ashy coals and hissing slabs of meat, carbonized pizza crusts and fire-roasted chickens, char-speckled vegetables and big, sloppy plates of lasagna that are smoking and blackened from their voyages through the ovens. Does the food approach the ethereal quality of Alto Palato, the old West Hollywood restaurant that was the progenitor of this tiny chain? Not yet. But as with a peepshow, quality may not quite be the point. 9575 W. Pico Blvd., L.A., (310) 277-0133. Lunch Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m., dinner Sun.-Thurs., 5-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5-11 p.m. Parking: Lot Available, Street. Beer/Wine. American. $$$

ZELO GOURMET PIZZERIA Arcadia is kind of a conservative place, but Zelo distinctly is not. The music, played loud, ranges from surf tunes to vintage punk rock, Blue Oyster Cult to Built To Spill, and might as well have been plucked from the iPod of the coolest guy you know. But it’s all about the pizza here, and Zelo’s pizza is a different sort of pie, crust enriched with a little cornmeal, packed and crimped into a high-rimmed steel deep-dish pizza pan blackened from years in the ovens, and baked to a kind of high crunchiness. This rough and tasty cornmeal-crusted pizza was invented at Vicolo, Patty Unterman’s late quick-service pizza joint in San Francisco. Zelo chef Mike Freeman, who cooked for eight years at Vicolo, has taken this style and made it his own. A vegetarian pizza, available in both vegan and cheese-bearing versions, is piled with baked eggplant, roasted peppers and mushrooms. Even the plain-vanilla sausage pie is plumped out with marinated peppers, tomato chunks and sauteed onions. This may be the great, undiscovered Los Angeles pizza restaurant. 328 E. Foothill Blvd., Arcadia, (626) 358-8298. Tues.-Thurs., 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m.; Fri.- Sat., 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun., 3-9 p.m. Parking: Street. Beer/Wine. Italian, Pizza. $