A pizza rant

So I finally got my Margherita pizza at Angie's, the new spot from chef Angelo Emiliani, and it was perfect.

Every detail shone: the vibrant lift of tomato sauce applied in just the right proportion; the fine milky stretch of mozzarella; the way the basil leaves had intensified as they simmered in their own juices while the pizza oven blasted away. Even the salty little shreds of parmesan sharpened the experience.

And the crust! Crisp and supple at once, stretchy and leopard-spotted on crown and bottom, full of flavor from the dough fermentation. This crust neither overwhelmed its cargo nor took a back seat to sauce and cheese.

And that, in the immortal words of Olympic gold medalist Alysa Liu, is what I'm fucking talking about. It's precisely that balance I seek in a pizza pie, and which is often missing in Houston pizzas.

One has only to read pizza threads in Yelp and Reddit to learn it's all about the toppings for most Houston pizza fans.

To my dismay, because I vastly prefer the Neapolitan style, in which ingredients like cheese, tomato and a few other carefully edited foodstuffs adorn a crust that is its own reason for being.

The pared-down Neapolitan style has never really flown in Houston. It first popped up, in modified form, in 2006 at chef Marco Wiles' Dolce Vita Pizzeria Enoteca.

Even Pizaro's, whose Naples-trained, founding pizzaiolo Bill Hutchinson helped pioneer the style here in 2011, leaned more into the toppings-laden New York and Detroit styles once the paterfamilias retired in 2017. His daughter and son took over, putting more emphasis on their Detroit and New York pies.

On my final Pizaro's visit, around 2019 at their Katy Freeway store, I noted a degree of what I think of as "toppings creep" on the formerly purist Neapolitan pies. Underneath, Pizaro's lovely Neapolitan crust labored to express itself. I never went back.

Terence Gallivan's Elro, which did pizzas in a balanced, carefully fermented Neapolitan vein, floundered last year despite its excellence. Coastline, which does a killer Neapolitan pizza, only bakes it after 5 p.m., and insulates its bottom line by offering a thick, rectangular pizza that's more like a flatbread.

When California mini-chain Pizzana hit town, laments swamped the internet over their first-rate, Neo-Neapolitan pizzas' size and moderately arranged toppings. Still do. Not big enough! Not brawny enough!!

We are the Land of Much; of Big, Bigger, Biggest; of Getting a Lot for my Money. Less is not more here. I've known that for all the six decades I've written and thought about food in Houston. Mostly it amuses and occasionally even delights me.

But not when it comes to pizza. Once I had sampled the joys of a properly made Neapolitan pie—my first brush with the style was at Chris Bianco's Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, in 1998—I was hooked. Never looked back, except in sorrow.

Which is precisely what I felt when, midway through my Margherita at Angie's, Emiliani told me, "I changed the Black Gold." That was the pie I had praised as sublime on my first visit to the spot. It needed no improvement.

Yet now, in response to crowd feedback, Emiliani had added actual wild mushrooms to supplement the brilliant notion of powdered porcini, one of the prime elements of the pie's dizzying umami effect.

Boom! Toppings creep. More of a crowd pleaser, Emiliani admitted to me. It's the way of the pizza world in Houston.

Just don't expect me to like it.