spacca napoli

now, i've always had a love/hate relationship with pizza. what i knew as pizza in europe was a thin yet chewy and crispy crusted, small pizza with sauce and cheese used sparingly, along with more interesting ingredients (like pancetta, shallots, egg or tuna). the pizza was served uncut so you had the choice of either using the knife and ford or just folding it in two to savour it.

what i knew as pizza in the u.s. was something LOADED with a layer of processed mozzarella, either sausage or pepperoni and some kind of vegetable, most commonly mushrooms, onions and green peppers. depending on the style (deep, stuffed, stuff crust, etc.), the crust would vary in thickness but you could always count on at least a half inch of oily cheese and sauce oozing from it. as for the shape of it, they came either round or square and were either cut into pie pieces or in squares.

i'll be honest and say i preferred the pizza i had in france and italy. they just seemed, well, simpler and wholesome than pizza from pizza hut, dominos, lil' ceasar's, and other local pizzerias. though i must make it clear i have enjoyed ooey-gooey pizza from places like lou malnati's and, a long, long time ago, villa palermo.

there's been A LOT of buzz over spacca napoli since it opened in 2006, especially about the fact that it's "traditional," "brick oven," and "flatbread" pizza. so when i heard about spacca napoli-more like walked past it as it's only four blocks from my house - i was annoyed because i was no longer eating wheat.

i'd been gluten free for about a year and a half when i heard spacca napoli was opened. i chalked it up to it being another one of the those places i'd never go, sad to say. i started dating Wheezy in late 2006. he is a pizza freak. well, he's a freak for anything that's pizza, burgers, fried and fast. he's a typical american, gen x bachelor who loves sports and has created a whole life revolving around the different sports seasons of basketball, baseball and football (cubs, bulls and bears, respectively. he is not the type of man i thought i'd date but that's another story for another time. back to the story:). we all know and love the food that lifestyle calls for: lots of pizza and fast food deliveries.

i remember the first time we ate together, on our first date, his face fell as i ordered the souvlaki at wrigleyville dog without a pita and explained to him "i don't eat wheat."

"you don't eat meat?" he said, looking at me like i was retarded since i'd just ordered beef.

"no, i don't eat WHEAT, you know, like grain? so no bread, no fried foods, no pizza, no cake, no cookies, stuff like that," i replied while getting a straw for my coke.

"no pizza?!! i practically live on pizza, " he said in disbelief. to keep the conversation from getting uncomfortable and since we volunteering food information about ourselves, he sweetly offered, "but i do hate all things green."

once i heard that, i knew i was dealing with a wheat-meat-cheese-and-potatoes kinda guy. was this fool in for a culinary dating adventure or what?! from the start, eating was a challenge for us because it basically ruled out pizza, c.w. napkin, a.j's grill, wrigleyville dog, wiener's circle and the myriad of other "good" food joints that cater to fast food heads in north chicago.

at first we ate at places where i could order food without wheat, mostly mexican restaurants. eventually, i pushed Wheezy into trying cuisines he'd never tried like french, ethiopian, indian, vietnamese, korean, turkish and other exotic types that are more wheat free friendly.

please understand eating thise types of foods was ground-breaking in the world of Wheezy - this is a man who believes salad is nothing but leaves and that there is no "possibly good explanation for broccoli at all, no matter what ANYone says!" yet this is the same man who sat and ate broccolini at nine steakhouse and helped eat most of it, had the saag paneer at marigold and said "yum!" with surprise as his eyes lit up and ate arugula at opera and replied he liked it and ate it willingly because he trusts opera's executive chef Paul Wildermuth implicitly.

after all this, imagine my surprise one day while driving and talking about what we should eat for dinner, i bemoaned my wheatless fate (i think i was talking out a jones for pizza i had eaten one late night in bologna with my friend alfredo), he said to me, "yea, all i wanna do is sit down with you and enjoy a pizza, babe!" of course the girl in me was all like, "awwwwwwww baby!" and really wanted that moment with my boyfriend. after all, wasn't it a choice i made as opposed to having it forced upon me due to a life or death allergy? because of this, i could, you know, lighten up? the romantic in me thinks sharing a pizza with my man is worth the temporary discomfort from not eating any wheat. or at least, i was willing to live with pesky side effect. what i won't do for love!

anyway, here's what that sacrifice/experience was like:

the name
say it outloud. spaaa-kah nah-po-leee. it has a really great roll off the tongue, doesn't it?

spaccanapoli is actually an old quarter/neighbourhood located in the heart of Napoli, apparently also carrying the great honour of being the place pizza was first served. or so the website claims.

the location
located off the beaten path, next to the metra tracks, it sits on the southeast block of the ravenswood and sunnyside intersection. just four blocks from my house, it's an easy walk. even from the montrose brown line stop, it's only a three block walk. convenient, wouldn't you say?

the decor
spacious with high ceilings and a back wall painted dark orange to accent the cream coloured kitchen featuring a traditional brick oven surrounded by dark wood tables and chairs taking up two storefronts; it's clean, open and appealing. the tables each have two glass bottles of Panna and San Pellegrino water and salt and pepper shakers.

it didn't necessarily remind me of some of the pizzerias i visited in places like milan, florence, rome, bologna and venice but it was pretty close. as soon as we walked in, freezing, we stepped into a nice and warm atmosphere.

the staff
from the moment we entered, the hosts smiled and seated us immediately. the waiters and busstaff wore all black: a black tshirt with the spaccanapoli logo and black pants with a short black waist apron.

our waiter read the specials from the board, which was to his back. because he turned to read the specials off the blackboard, i couldn't hear what they were. as you may know, one of my pet peeves when dining out is when the server doesn't know the specials well and has to read them off the board or from their pad. so i wasn't interested enough to ask him again what they were.

service was prompt and even the bus staff were on top of their game because i didn't have to ask once for a water refill or make an obvious pleeeeease-i-want-you-take-this-away expression while lifting a dish towards them as they walk past me.

what i ate
i started with the insalata mista, field greens topped with the requisite balsamic vinegar & olive oil. it was ok. mostly because it reminded me that i have the same field greens in my crisper and the trick with that stuff is to be sure to run it under cold, fresh water to "revive" it and pick out the wilted parts. it had not been "revived" nor picked.

we also got four slices of break made from the pizza dough drizzled with olive oil and chopped basil. the olive oil had a nice olive flavour. i took it easy on the bread because i "saving" myself for the pizza.

i ordered the funghi & salsiccia (ummm, sausage and mushroom.) with fior di latte mozzarella (the cow's milk version ) and tomato sauce. when it came, it smelled great and man, did it LOOK great! the crust toasted a crispy brown with dark speckles on the edges and melted cheese, red sauce, browned sausage, mushrooms and a few basil leaves, all topped off with drizzled olive oil scattered all over it made it look SO WORTH it! MY pizza! yum-MEEE! i was ex-CI-ted!

it came uncut. i had decide how to eat it, in triangles or squares. i decided to cut it into six squares. i put my knife down and picked up my first slice of pizza in a very, very long time and with my mouth watering, lifted the slice to taste and... that's when things started to fall apart.

the center of the pizza seemed... how to say this nicely... uncooked. there was nothing firm about it. i understand the crust is thin but it's still got to have some sort of structural integrity, doesn't it?! the crust at the edge was nice but lost it in the middle. this made eating it as slices a challenge until you got closer to the edge.

i also felt i'd been jipped with the sauce. it was soupy, of which i am sure contributed to the structural breakdown of crust integrity and it just wasn't... flavourful. i like tomato sauce to taste a bit salty and acidic but like a round, juicy TOMATO (and while i'm at, preferably a roma tomato please, thank you.) it tasted like a water-logged tomato. i'm sure the drizzled olive oil added more moisture to the mix and further destroyed my pizza's integrity!

i realise i just complained earlier about the fact that american pizza has too much cheese but this pizza didn't have nearly enough cheese! but it sure did have a lot of that soupy tomato sauce. :(

the salsiccia, on the other hand, was spicy, tangy and chewy and there was a good amount of it. it's a damn pity that beautiful salsiccia was swimming in that soupy tomato sauce with three or four cheese puddles and some mushroom slices sparsely dotting the pizza i had chosen to sacrifice my skin and GI tract for?

i could not resist trying the zabaglione, a custard typically made with a few tablespoons of marsala wine. this is a tricky custard because it it best made using the double boiler method but can be made on the range if the maker has the custard juju on their side. i was feeling a bit glutton for punishment and ordered it, despite knowing there was no way in hell it would be "right."

it came in a small tumbler glass topped with a few raspberries. the texture was grainy as if the eggs had not been tempered before being added to the sugar mixture. it did have a nice aftertaste of alcohol and i think mascarpone was added cause it was creeeeeeeamy.

so what did Wheezy think? he recently said, "even if it's bad pizza, like from dominos or pizza hut, it's still good cause it's pizza." yes, he's cliche but my boyfriend is a bit less dramatic and more realistic than i am in general and counters my flair for drama. with no expectations, he had a pizza with his girl on a saturday night. finally.

oh and, we drank water even though they have big selection of italian soft drinks, beers, wines and liquors and ovbiously the beloved expresso.

my opinion overall?
it was just okay, not great or amazing. remeber, i stepped into this joint with a carte blanche to eat the dreaded enemy: wheat. i wanted my pizza to be earth-shatteringly awesome! plus it was gonna be "brick-oven, italian-style" pizza... SOOOOO worth it!

the fact that our pizzas were not easy to pick up annoyed me. the fact it tasted thin on flavour and watery peeved me. the fact that i was reminded about how to prepare field greens from a big box irked me. and knowing when ordering it, the zabaglione was going to bug me for not being "right."

i also recognise that i probably had unrealistically high expectations because a) i was rabid for pizza (think about it, i haven't eaten a pizza in at least 3 years), b) i wanted it be perfect because i was "cheating" and i only do that for "special" occasions, and c) spacca napoli is just another upscale neighbourhood pizza joint pandering to the idea that "everything authentic/imported" will make it taste good.

that said, i'm not a total jerk. if they can look into the "crust integrity" issue, it'll be an improvement. and while i'm all for "everything authentic," it does help to "pay attention to the little things" to ensure it's really authentic and good.

would i go again?
probably not. the next time i use blatant disregard while playing with gluten, i'll try pizza d.o.c.

the prices are high. we had one salad, a pizza each and one dessert and paid over $40.

spacca napoli's 411
1769 w. sunnyside
chicago, il 60640
773.878.2420
http://www.spaccanapolipizzeria.com
check the site for days and hours of operation. i think it's closed on mondays and tuesdays.