Pizzeria Mozza

• Cuisine(s): Italian, Modern European, Pizza
  Hours: Daily 12pm-0am
  Price: $$$
• Payment Types: MasterCard, Visa
  Features: Takeout, Private Party
  Serving: Dinner, Late Night, Lunch
• Alcohol: Beer/Wine
  Reservations: Accepted, Required
  Parking: Valet

Description

It is almost impossible to have a civil discussion about pizza in this city of immigrants, because there may be no foodstuff so intimately linked to one's sense of identity. But in the wood oven at Pizzeria Mozza, Nancy Silverton has more or less reinvented the very idea of pizza, airy and burnt and risen around the rim, thin and crisp in the center, neither bready in the traditional Neapolitan manner nor wispy the way you find pizza in the best places in Tuscany. The crust is sweet and bitter, salty and chewy, circled by crunchy charred bubbles. Every pizza at Mozza is a unique marriage of flour, salt and hot-burning almond wood, stretched into irregular discs, as individually lovable as children. The crust is so good, in fact, that it may be at its best dressed with nothing more than a drizzle of good olive oil and a few grains of sea salt - though it's not sad to eat topped with burrata and vivid squash blossoms, taleggio and house-made sausage, lardo and rosemary. or pureed anchovies and fried egg. (The mandatory caveat applies here: Silverton is a family friend.) This isn't the pizza you used to eat back in Jersey, and that, perhaps, is the point.