Tiny Champions' must-have spring pizza

The sight of EaDo pizza joint Tiny Champions' spring onions pizza on Instagram last week triggered my Think-and-Do impulse. It boasted seven (!) kinds of alliums, the bulbous-rooted flowering plants that include onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, chives and beyond. So it had my name on it.

I never met an allium that I didn't like.

Essentially this is a white pizza with a base layer of red onions braised in butter, then pureed with crème fraîche and lemon. Yum, right?

Next comes mozzarella topped with a variegated scatter of pickled garlic; toasty, pleasantly fibrous lengths of roasted spring onion stalk; snappy crescents of roasted red onion; and assorted squiggles of pickled onion, snipped chives and fermented scallion.

It all added up to a wild, vibrant mix of flavors and textures, deeply savory and salty, with flashes of tartness and—because it's Houston—a sneaky current of chile heat on the end. The crust, with its high crown and darkly browned bubbles of near-char, was crisp and thin-bottomed, more complex than your garden-variety deck-oven pizza.

That bubbly pizza crust lives up to Tiny Champions' name, a winking reference to the yeasts that play a role in making bread, wine and cheese. It's a nod to the bacteria that assist pickling and fermentation, too, processes that have always been central here and at mothership Nancy's Hustle, just down the street. So the spring onions pizza really plants the restaurant's flag.

I ordered the whole $23 pie for myself. I did not share. I considered that maybe, maybe, I might have enjoyed it a little more with 10 to 20 per cent less salt, but then that applies to me and most Houston dishes. And it would seem churlish to ask the kitchen, "Hold that final dusting of grated Pecorino." Because basically I was in heaven.

I stayed there, right through the counterintuitive strawberry ice-cream sundae with its strawberry compote and faintly tart/savory blanket of whipped crème fraîche (there's those tiny champions again). Not to mention the amusing sprinkle of multicolored, candied fennel seeds on top. A dessert fit for the Mad Hatter's birthday party.

The place thronged with Astros fans and assorted pizza hounds almost as soon as the doors opened up at 5 p.m. on the dot—there was already a line on the sunny sidewalk—and I was delighted to be among them. Not least because the restaurant has the easy vibe of your favorite dive bar, where you can slide into a counter seat, josh with the bartenders, drift off with the vintage hip-hop thump of Jay Dilla and just chill.

Grab a glass of Pieropan Soave, an Italian white with just the right calming notes for that jumpy spring pizza, and you're all set.

From top left: spring onion pizza slice; strawberry ice cream sundae with crème fraiche whip & fennel sprinkles; allium bed at Houston Botanic Garden in spring; pizza close-up; inside that Tiny Champions crust! Photos by Alison Cook.