Beyond the Pizza Principle

Di Pasquale's Marketplace
3700 Gough St.
Highlandtown


Pizza Club has often felt the inexplicable drive to put disgusting pizza into our bodies: pizza suffused with the hydrogenated oils of late capitalism, pizza desiccated under the wan lights of the 7-11 counter, pizza sodden with the cynical rhetoric of saving the world through consumer choice.

The death-drive is a well-documented motive force behind America's relationship with convenience foods, and Pizza Club is no exception. A veneer of ironic epicureanism makes the thing more palatable, the thing being our non-optional participation in a nihilistic system that will probably destroy everything we love. Maybe it's the potassium ions in our cells longing for a return to equilibrium, how the universe's matter wants to spread itself across an immense silent vacuum and pizza is merely a means to this end.

There are, however, things that make the daily struggle against entropy worthwhile. Some of those things, confusingly, are also pizza, like Di Pasquale's on Gough St. in Highlandtown. Di Pasquale's is a purely pleasurable experience of pizza. They're doing almost everything right, and also surrounding you, the pizza-eater, with towering shelves of Italian specialty foods.

Margherita: reccommended

We enjoyed “one of the best sauces in Baltimore” and the firm but elastic sound of fresh cheese masticating between our molars. The crust is thin, but has substantial fluffiness around the edges and holds its toppings.

Soppresatta: also much-loved

Pizza Club tried some exotic options, like pies with tuna fish and chicken on them. These are sometimes attention-seeking menu moves that don't pay off, but Di Pasquale's handled them reasonably well. The tuna pizza was “good-weird,” and a favorite of the group, though sauce-less and more like a flatbread. The chicken, “always a little weird” on pizzas, was intermingled with some slimy spinach and thus we'd recommend steering away from that combo. Get the most normal pizza you see on the menu – not a pile of toppings, just a pizza – and you'll experience a thing that this century-old pizza establishment does very masterfully.

Tuna: surprising novelty success

Pizza Club is even prepared to adjust its metaphysics based on this experience. We've long regarded Gill's as Baltimore's ur-pizza, but in fact there may be two pillars of pure pizza-form rising from the primordial chaos. Gill's represents the perfection of a suburban pizza mode that is cheap, tasty, feeds your whole family, and is unabashedly no-nonsense American which entails an undercurrent of darkness and destruction as you drive up Belair Road in traffic. Di Pasquale's is the brick oven Italian-style pizza that we thought wasn't even worth looking for because we stopped believing in authenticity or any fixed “reality” at all. Christine the librarian has been telling us about Di Pasquale's for years and we just weren't ready to accept that there might be a knowable past that we could touch in the form of a continuous pizza tradition. So listen to your librarian is the other take-home message here.

Chicken and spinach: not meant to be together

You could go back to Di Pasquale's again and again. They close at 6pm, which requires leaving work early. Adjust your schedule, be honest about your motivations, get the thing that imbues you with a will to soldier onward into the dissipating grey Baltimore evening.

7/8 slices

Photo credits: Dave

Duck, duck, pizza

Birroteca
1520 Clipper Road

Baltimore

We really liked Birroteca. We like what they're doing. But Birroteca is bigger than pizza. In what follows I will try to review Birroteca's pizza while also conveying a broader sense of how this new venue fits or does not fit into the densely-woven, shimmering fabric of Your Baltimore Life.

Your Baltimore Life

 This place opened in September and is probably in the running for best low-key-but-conspicuously-tasteful restaurant in the city. Many people on the Tuesday night that we visited appeared to be on dates, kind-of-dates, or after-work drinks that could potentially turn into a date (I inferred this from body language). Like the couple who we sat next to and whose conversation we interrupted throughout their meal to talk about pizza. Their date seemed to be going pretty well, but they looked like a seasoned couple, accustomed to having their nice evenings crashed by large groups of pizza fanatics. 

Nice on the inside

Here's how this works for a first date situation: you, if you happen to be the date asker, explain that the restaurant is in Hampden, which is a known quantity for most people even if they're afraid of Baltimore (which you haven't determined yet because it's the first date). The address, the Baltimore Sun reassures us, shows up on GPS. However, after driving the winding, unlit stretch of Falls and Clipper Mill roads leading to Birroteca, your date is a bit apprehensive and wondering if you have terrible taste or are crazy. The address is a squat former industrial building on a gravel lot under the highway. Then the date walks inside – and lo! - it is a carefully-designed upscale bistro with salvaged fixtures and chalkboard art and a retro bar and the acoustic ceiling tiles have been replaced with acoustic ceiling tiles designed to look like an antique tin ceiling. So this is a great way to impress your love interest who doesn't get around Baltimore much or is new to the city with your knowledge of the restaurant scene (which is apparently cooler than knowing about bands, food is the new rock, etc.). I'm not trying to run your life for you or anything, but Birroteca is definitely a good date place.

Incidentally, I used to think that when people talked about whether a city is “good” or “bad” to live in they were talking about access to amenities – art, music, museums, transportation, parks, Whole Foods, etc. Now I think they're referring to the number of good date restaurants. Baltimore is no better off by some measures than it was three years ago, but now we have so many good date restaurants that people will start moving here and spawn families and fill the proposed youth prison site with daffodils and rainbows.

Pizza is definitely part of this picture, since people who are not lactose-intolerant really like it (Birroteca is not equipped to provide fake-cheese substitutions). Once you've made it into Birroteca (and this is a challenge – it's so buzzy at the moment that they were booked up on a Tuesday and turning people away), you will have a specialty pizza selection as well as the option to choose your own toppings. There is also an infinite selection of local craft beers. Your knowledge of these beers and their local provenance will further impress your date, or make you look like an asshole. This isn't under your control – your manner of conveying craft beer knowledge is an indicator of deeper, underlying personality issues.

Pizza Club ordered the Locavore, Duck Duck Goose, Pesto, and Spicy Sausage Fennel pizzas. The waitstaff of Birroteca are very nice; they Facebook-messaged me to make sure we could get seats, because they thought that Pizza Club was pretty important (this remains for history to judge). 

 

"Locavore"

The Locavore pizza was billed as having “roasted market vegetables,” mozzarella, and olive oil, but the vegetables turned out to be mostly arugula and sauteed onions, with possibly some squash underneath. This was not a bad thing; the crunchy bitter greens balanced the sweetness of the cheese, and it worked well texture-wise. I'd like to underline that their mozzarella was pretty good. The crust was a bit charred, and Adrian suggested that feta cheese and some kind of sauce would make good additions to the pie. Some found the salad-on-a-pie arrangement unwieldy, but others were comforted by the presence of vegetables.

Paul Giamatti: Friend of Ducks

Another thing that makes your casual dinner date tasteful and classy is the addition of small bits of duck meat to whatever you're eating. After seeing this Nature documentary about ducks, narrated by Paul Giamatti (who loves ducks), I can no longer support the killing of ducks for food. However, the Duck Duck Goose pizza was apparently very, very delicious. Chris's response to the first bite was “I would eat this pizza every day of my life.” The pie came with duck confit, fig and onion jam, a balsamic vinegar reduction, fontina and asagio cheeses, and a duck egg cracked on top and baked. It was that end of the slice with duck egg on it that people were really into. Everyone around me was closing their eyes to savor this duck egg on a pizza, at which point I began to wonder about my life and what I am doing. 

 

Tasty duck

The Spicy Sausage Fennel pizza was less of a blockbuster – described as “underwhelming” and “non-threatening”. Some complained that there wasn't enough going on. Sauce and toppings were sparse, leaving mostly bread and cheese that, for some reason, wasn't as good as the other cheese on the first pizzas. This lack of other stuff led us to meditate on the crust. Birroteca is doing something with its crust that is more interesting than the typical gourmet-pizza-boom restaurant that installs a brick oven and assumes that whatever crust they put in it will come out delicious. Birroteca's crust was kind of pretzel-y and buttery, crisp on the outside and able to hold up its toppings despite being rolled thin. This is a special thing, and makes their pizza worth ordering even though they have many other authentic locally-sourced type menu items that are obviously quite good. It was great that we had the opportunity to notice this, but the sausage pizza was deemed “hollow and unsatisfying.” 

We didn't like the sausage that much but obviously we ate it all anyway

 

Finally, we ordered a Pesto pizza, which contained a lot of pesto. The crust on this one struck us as doughier, more flatbread-ish and less crispy. One would assume that all the dough in a restaurant is made from the same recipe, but we inferred that perhaps the baking times are different for different pies, leading to textural variation. We enjoyed the pesto and tomato combination, and the understated presence of mozzarella and ricotta. This would make a very solid appetizer pizza, as there's not too much going on – it's clean and each ingredient is there for a reason.

Pesto

By the end of this Pizza Club meeting, we had all gone on a lovely date with each other and with the other people on dates around us whose dates we interrupted. Who says that dating is dead? Perhaps society is ready to move beyond a rigidly dyadic relationship concept. We are all in a relationship with pizza, and with each other, and as this relationship deepens and evolves, we will sometimes need to jazz things up by going to fancy restaurants and spending a lot of money. This may ultimately make the world a better place, but also the world may not last long enough for it to work.

6/8 slices

Review: Kyro Pizza

Kyro Pizza

900 Cathedral St.

Baltimore, MD

We arrived at Kyro Pizza on a dreary evening and were treated to dreary pizza. Not that it was bad pizza necessarily, but it was not the kind of pizza that inspires faith in the progress of civilization. With so much going on in the pizza world, and the stakes in the gourmet pie game growing ever higher, it's disappointing to encounter a place with the form, but not the content, of pizza connoisseurship.

nice-looking wall thing

Kyro has a snazzy design scheme, with website, menu, and interior décor coordinated to convey some kind of young, hip, trendy vibe. But is it enough to install a brick oven and write “Maryland's best brick oven pizza” on your website banner? They offer a lot of other Middle Eastern menu items which are perhaps better than their pizza – for some reason, restaurants like to tack pizza onto their normal offerings, but it's a bad move to promote lackluster pizza over the things that you actually make well. Really, our gripe with Kyro was the over-hyping – you can't design your way around average pizza with pretty signs.

When we slogged in from the rain on a swampy Wednesday night, there was one other occupied booth in the place. As we waited for pies, a discourse on cheese-pizza essentialism unfolded - I think the point was that plain cheese pizza is the closest that one can get to the pure Platonic form of pizza while trapped within the finite bounds of human consciousness. This conversation was relevant because there's a lot of stuff on the Kyro menu that my mom would think is “weird”/“crazy”: they are particularly noted for exotic pies like the Sharm el-Shek (salmon and caviar), the sloppy joe and hotdog pizzas, and the General Kyro, which is a pizza with General Tso's chicken on it. These items demonstrate that they are willing to put anything on a pizza, so we're supposed to give them credit for adventurousness. But what about the foundations? We ordered with an eye to uncovering the pure form of a Kyro pizza.

foundations: elasticity

We got four pies: a Margarita (tomato sauce and cheese, determined to be the most elemental cheese pizza out of four on the menu), a Dahb (grilled eggplant, roasted red peppers, garlic, tomato sauce, sun-dried tomatoes), Di Funghi (sauce, cheese, and mushrooms), and an India (Tandoori chicken, spicy tomato yogurt curry, squash and mozzarella with mango chutney). 

just regular pizza

The cheese pizza, a litmus test, did not bode well. Dan pointed out that Kyro's use of a brick oven was technically adept: the thin crust was correctly cooked, with a nice even bake, and the dough had been proofed correctly because there were no huge air bubbles. However, the crust lacked spring or bounce – it was very typical, and not really worth finishing. The central part of the pie could have used more sauce. The cheese was “fresh enough,” but too salty, and the whole thing lacked “zing.” Dan observed that pizza, like sex, is good even when it's bad, which is one way of looking at it.

Dahb pizza

We asked for a Dahb pizza with whole wheat crust, which, in light of their issues with regular crust, was a mistake. It was crunchy but bland and flavorless. The toppings were excellent, especially the eggplant, suggesting that it might be smart to order non-pizza menu items containing eggplant. The sauce, again, was standard pizza parlor sauce. What were we thinking, dragging down an adequate pizza in the name of health? I would caution against it. Get your whole grain fiber somewhere else.

vegan mushroom pizza

We also customized our mushroom pizza with soy cheese to test out Kyro's vegan accommodations (past reviewers have praised their vegan food). Nobody noticed the soy cheese, but that's because the pizza itself was just boring. It resembled any other pie you would get at a standard pizza parlor. In a world of specialty pizza inflation (see: Joe Squared's mushroom pizza with forty kinds of mushrooms), paying premium prices for shrively plain mushrooms is not cool ($15.50 for a 14” pie). This seems equitable towards the dairy and non-dairy consumer, at least, since veganizing made no noticeable difference in quality.

India pizza (chutney not pictured)

Finally, the meat-friendly dug in to the India pizza. They really liked the mango chutney that came in plastic containers on the side. “It's like dessert on a pizza,” said Chris. Upon closer examination we concluded that it might be Smucker's apricot jam. The tandoori chicken was a bit chewy, and nobody noticed the yogurt sauce. We proceeded to spread “chutney” on the remaining slices of every pie to make them more palatable.

yes to chutney

This may seem like an overly harsh evaluation, and it probably is. But things are competitive out there. A new high-end fancy pizza place opens every week. Claiming to be “the best” in this booming industry is an invitation to critical scrutiny, and Kyro Pizza doesn't hold up very well. At around $17 for a large specialty pie, you could do better somewhere else. If you really want caviar, and you want it on a pizza, then this is the place for you. However, from our perspective, fancy toppings don't make up for lackluster foundations.

“Good but not life-changing”

3.5/8