Zelo Gourmet Pizzeria

Arcadia is kind of a conservative place, but Zelo distinctly is not. The music, played loud, ranges from surf tunes to vintage punk rock, Blue Oyster Cult to Built To Spill, and might as well have been plucked from the iPod of the coolest guy you know. But it’s all about the pizza here, and Zelo’s pizza is a different sort of pie, crust enriched with a little cornmeal, packed and crimped into a high-rimmed steel deep-dish pizza pan blackened from years in the ovens, and baked to a kind of high crunchiness. This rough and tasty cornmeal-crusted pizza was invented at Vicolo, Patty Unterman’s late quick-service pizza joint in San Francisco. Zelo chef Mike Freeman, who cooked for eight years at Vicolo, has taken this style and made it his own. A vegetarian pizza, available in both vegan and cheese-bearing versions, is piled with baked eggplant, roasted peppers and mushrooms. Even the plain-vanilla sausage pie is plumped out with marinated peppers, tomato chunks and sauteed onions. This may be the great, undiscovered Los Angeles pizza restaurant.

• Cuisine(s): Italian, Pizza

  Hours: Sun 3pm-9pm, Tue-Thu 11:30am-9pm, Fri-Sat 11:30am-10pm

  Price: $

• Features: Takeout

  Serving: Dinner, Lunch

  Reservations: Accepted, Not Necessary

• Parking: Street