Review: Nonna Trattoria - Cusco, Peru

Need more evidence that we're living in a Pizza Renaissance? More than 12,000 feet above sea level in Peru is the city of Cusco, which was the hub of the Inca civilization 2500 years ago. 

Cassandra, Mike, Tom, and our guide Efrain. See the Inca stone walls!

The same indigenous people who built Machu Picchu used their advanced stoneworking skills to construct buildings that are still intact today; many buildings in Cusco have Inca walls in their ground levels. 

Exterior shot, again the Inca walls

In this relatively remote and high altitude place, our tour group set out for pizza and found a trattoria offering Neapolitan style pies!

Nonna Trattoria is near the center of Cusco, and like so many other buildings (including the Marriott hotel), it is built on Inca walls, visible from both the interior and exterior. Inside, it's a cozy place with two dining areas. 

We sat at a table where we could watch the pizzaiolo making the pies. We ordered some local Peruvian beers and ordered a variety of personal size Neapolitan pizzas, steering clear of some options that were overloaded with toppings.

Inca wall pattern on the beer glass

A local Cusco dark beer

Perhaps it was an adjustment to baking Neapolitan pizzas at high altitude, but the pie man did something I've never seen - he did a parbake on the crust alone, then removed the crust to add toppings before the finishing bake. 

Underside of the crust

It was a slow process, because the small wood-fired oven could make just one pizza at a time and we had a big group.

Jody and Jamshid

Because it was late and we were very hungry after a day of vigorous hiking, we inhaled the pizzas. The pies were nicely baked and tasty, with some good fresh toppings and some interesting chorizo on one one pizza. 

There were no fundamental flaws in these pies; the flavors were in balance, there were no wet spots or soggy crust areas. By Italian or American standards, though, the pizzas were pretty pedestrian. There was no puffy cornicione or leopard spotting to the crust. In fact, the crust was what you might expect from a frozen Neapolitan or the best frozen pizzas you can get at Trader Joe's.

Cheri, Debra, Ken, Pat, Flora, Senthil

If you're in Cusco and craving pizza, it's a solid choice. Good savory flavors riding on an adequate crust, it filled our bellies and the service was great, all in a building where Incas once ruled.

Review: Slice of Austin Pizza Kitchen - Lakeway, TX

After five years in Texas, it's no longer surprising but still a delight for this Jersey boy to find great pizza here, because I had arrived in Central Texas with modest expectations. I had already known about and experienced most of the bigger names in the region, such as Via 313, Salvation Pizza, Home Slice, and Pieous. But in the western suburbs (Bee Cave, Lakeway, Spicewood) I expected to seek out BBQ and Mexican food as surrogates for the great pizza I could easily find in the Philadelphia region, my home for decades.

In late 2020, a small take-out only shop popped up on Route 620, north of Lakeway. In that small red building the owners were making some phemonenal pizza. At the time I wrote this about Lake Travis Pizza:

The cheese was very well balanced to the rest of the pizza, but it was a role player here. The sauce, however, was remarkable. Dark, thick, rich, and bursting with flavor. I would have liked more of it on this pie. And of course, the spicy cup pepperoni was about a perfect accent, adding yet one more layer of umami... Lake Travis pizza is superb stuff, and more proof that "it's the water" is a silly myth about great NYC pizza. Water has almost nothing to do with it; it's about quality ingredients and pizzamaking skills. Lake Travis pizza has that in spades.

It was easily the top NY style pizza in Austin's western suburbs. After a brief expansion that included a sit-down location in Four Points, Lake Travis Pizza returned to a one-location pizza place there on 620. A few years ago, it closed, much to my dismay.

The next proprietors of that site painted the red building robin's egg blue and opened up "Hella Bad" Pizza there. I never got a chance to try it before it closed, and it sat vacant for a while until the very recent opening of Slice of Austin Pizza Kitchen, keeping the blue color of the shop.

I was intrigued by some of the online chatter around Slice of Austin Pizza Kitchen; the pics and description made me hopeful for another great pizza in the region. One thing that I particularly loved about Lake Travis Pizza was that they offered legit NYC pizza that was truly superior to 95% of the pizza actually sold in New York. 

While I appreciate the American embrace of Neapolitan pizza, my heart belongs to New York (style). And these pies at Slice of Austin Pizza Kitchen looked like old-school thin crust pizza; their website claims 48-hour dough proofing to craft "hand-tossed New York-style pizzas featuring a delightful thin, chewy crust."

Nice color underneath

You can get a 12" or 18" pie; we did a "Build Your Own" 18" pizza with mushrooms and sausage. A pizza is always best when eaten on premises, but this is a takeout-only business. The pizza did suffer sweating in a cardboard box for the half-hour drive home, then a few hours at room temp before we re-heated it (on a perforated pan) in the oven for dinner.

Mushroom quality varies widely from pizzeria to pizzeria; these looked conventional but had a nice, deep, earthy flavor.  The sausage was done in the only proper way -- applied in raw chunks so that it cooks on the pie. The cheese was exactly what you want on a New York style pizza; generous but not overwhelming, creamy and salty, a high-end role player to the crust, sauce, and toppings. The sauce had a nice tang, and we all wished there had been more of it on the pizza.

The crust - the key to any pizza - was as advertised. It served as an excellent anchor for the combination of complex flavors we got from the mushrooms, sausage, and cheese. It was thin, but generally sturdy enough to support the toppings. It had wonderful flavor of its own, but using a bread analogy, more akin to soft rolls than to a crusty loaf.

If I were crafting this pizza to my own personal preferences, I'd have more tomato sauce and a crisper crust. But this combination of flavors and a softer chewy crust has a ton of appeal. Really well-crafted pizza, and our service was exceedingly polite and thoughtful. Slice of Austin Pizza Kitchen may have the best New York style pizza in the Lakeway area.

Review: Capo's Pizza - San Antonio TX

San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in America; it has more people than Boston, Dallas, San Diego, Detroit, Seattle, or Atlanta. Among its many charms are the Pearl District, the River Walk, fabulous Mexican food, an ample supply of affordable housing, and of course the Alamo.

San Antonio's RiverWalk

What is lacks is great pizza. Among America's ten largest cities, San Antonio ranks 10th in regard to the number of pizza destinations worth your time and travel. It does have a few gems: Stella Public House and Dough Pizzeria Napoletana are making top-shelf Neapolitan pizzas; there is an outpost of the New York Grimaldi's chain; Il Forno is crafting masterful NY/Neapolitan hybrid pizzas; and Trilogy is offering New York, California, and Chicago style pies.

Because I'm just 90 minutes away in Austin, I get frequent opportunities to explore what the natives are eating in San Antonio, and the local chain Capo's gets a lot of love online. Capo's also ranked #1 in a story from the San Antonio News-Express in 2020 (https://tinyurl.com/ExpressNewsPizza) and still ranked #6 in 2023 after some "growing pains." 

Capo's was particularly intriguiging because it offers "Buffalo style" pizza, since the owners came from Buffalo NY. I targeted the original location (out of the current six spots) to find out how good it is.

From the outside, Capo's looks like a typical generic strip-mall pizza place that makes passable pizza using cheap Sysco ingredients. Inside, it was a much nicer space than I would have guessed, with some interesting wall art and iconic red checkerboard tablecloths.

I ordered an 18" pie with sausage after the server informed me that the sausage is applied raw (the only proper way to add sausage to a pizza, since it browns on the pie and lends its savory drippings to the flavor mix).

The pie arrived looking like a generic strip mall pizza, with a pale and puffy cornicione. The crust was soft and tender throughout, without a hint of crisping even at the edge. It had lots of flop; even worse, the cheese was riding atop the thin sauce and had no adhesion to the crust. I feel that it was this kind of poorly-made pizza that created the unfortunate habit of folding pizza slices in half just to manage a soft slippery mess. 

Thin, soft, pale, floppy crust

The crust was like a large circular Olive Garden breadstick -- pale, bready, and soft. Despite that major failing, the pie overall had a pleasant flavor, in the same way that a generic Domino's or Papa John's pizza is still better than no pizza. What else could go wrong? Well, the topping was slices of pre-cooked sausage, despite my server's misperception on that topic.

Overall, the service was very polite and attentive, the place is clean and attractive, and it would be a fine place to take a bunch of kids out for pizza. But this pizza failed the DiGiorno test -- is is better than a midscale frozen pizza? Sadly, no.