Best Food Writing 2014 (43 page)

Smith—famous for his house-cured meats and sausages at Empire State South—has changed his diet, too, and has shed considerable weight. As Jen says, he's “juicing like a [expletive].”

The two Ryans spread their shopping haul across the kitchen
counter. Smith cuts eggplants next to a jar of pickled ring bologna—an Indiana specialty that Ryan wants to reproduce at Staplehouse. Next to that are Resveratrol tablets, an antioxidant found in grape skins, and Afinitor, an FDA-approved drug for advanced cancers.

Ryan cuts an onion the way chefs cut onions, down and sideways and across, the dice so fine as to be translucent, like onion snow. He sizzles these bits in a heavy pan and adds a drop or two of honey that slicks the bottom with erupting bubbles. A dash of apple cider vinegar hisses and deglazes the pan. Another chef might draw attention to the French name—
gastrique
—for this sauce foundation. For Ryan it is a beginning, an invisible step that diners won't be able to put their fingers on but will make them wonder why his food has so much flavor. He adds slivered rainbow peppers from a local farm and a drop of sweet grape barbecue sauce from a canning jar he put up last year.

Ryan knows that some people—particularly ones who lurk at the bottom of comment sections of online forums—have voiced suspicions about the whole Staplehouse/Giving Kitchen model. Does “nonprofit” mean they'll be drawing outsized salaries from the funds raised during their Indiegogo campaign? “I hope people can understand there is no motive here,” Ryan says. “The situation sucked so bad, we wanted it to be something good. This is not my retirement job. This is about being sure people are taken care of.”

In the garden behind Staplehouse a creeping fig climbs a pitted concrete wall, its vine laden with bell-shaped green fruit. “You can't eat these,” says Ryan, breaking one open to reveal spongy, juiceless flesh. “But it's got this great tropical smell—lychee, coconutty. I'm thinking it would make a great infusion for a cocktail.” He wants to preserve this essence, have it ready for the restaurant's anticipated February opening.

For Ryan, cooking locally means that he finds potential everywhere, growing all around him.

And cooking seasonally? It means thinking ahead. Ryan knows the seasons will pass, one after the next. As a chef he captures the flavor—the joy—of
now
.

*
Kessler, John. “Savoring the Now.” From the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, October 6, 2013 © 2013 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.(
www.ajc.com
)

T
he Best Pizza in America is the best pizza in America, but it's not the best pizza in America. Does that make sense?

Of course it does, or doesn't. The maker of The Best Pizza in America could clear this up—but he'd rather not. He'd rather you just eat his pizza. Let me explain: Chris Bianco, the chef and owner of Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, has been called the best pizza chef in the United States (by the
New York Times,
by
Bon Appétit
). He's been called “the godfather of American pizza” (by
GQ
) and an “acknowledged master of his discipline” (by
Gourmet
); he's the only American pizza chef to win a James Beard Award.

But Bianco himself dislikes the labels, shrugs off superlatives, and seems allergic to accolades. Of his pizza, he'll say, “I hope it's never better than your mother's or your favorite.” Regarding his plaudits, he'll reply, “We all get our 15 minutes of fame, and I think I'm overtime on mine.”

And yet, he works maniacally to make the best pizza possible—he still rises at 7 a.m. and works until midnight; still shops for ingredients at the local farmers' market, still makes his own mozzarella, still kneads the dough. “Oh,” he'll tell you, “I need it.” He wants things precise—farmers have been known to hold rulers up to their arugula
because Bianco prefers it to be a certain length (these farmers also happen to love him). The man is casually exacting. The best pizza in America is and isn't the best pizza in America; is a koan; is a paradox; is a palindrome. A man. A plan. A pizza.

Read this sentence. During the time it took you to do so, Americans inhaled more than 350 slices of pizza. As you first glanced at the “R” in “Read”—well, a full pizza disappeared. Americans eat more than 2,500 pizzas every minute. We love it: Tick tick tick, chomp chomp chomp.

And yet, we generally think that eating pizza is unhealthy. We think of it as fast food—a more benign fast food than, say, burgers, but not by much; we'd never call it health food. But what if pizza were a health food? What if, when you ate pizza, you thought, “Well, at least that's one good thing I did for my body today.”

Such is the promise of Bianco's product: a pizza that might not only be good for you, but—composed entirely of local ingredients—might also be good for the place where you live?

But that promise requires staying close to home. “I don't want an imitation or a cloned deal,” Bianco told the
Arizona Republic
in 2006. “The place is so small and cramped and I'm sweaty and it's loud, but somewhere in the chaos of it all, you find a sense of place.” Bianco so loved that sense of place that during his first two decades, he had a hand in creating nearly every pizza at Pizzeria Bianco. Two-hundred and fifty pizzas a night, and Bianco's digits danced over nearly every one, night in, night out—until he eventually acquiesced to excessive demand for his wares. He opened a sandwich shop in 2005. Then he opened a bar next to his original pizza place, to accommodate overflow; then he opened an alternate “Italian restaurant” locale in Phoenix.

But it wasn't until just one year ago that Bianco agreed to create a new Pizzeria Bianco. This time, 150 miles southeast from the original. This time, in Tucson.

“Is this a chain?” an old woman asked. She was asking the bartender this at the original Pizzeria Bianco—an innocent question; she'd simply enjoyed a great meal and wondered if she could have a similar experience closer to her house—and she had no way of knowing that Chris Bianco himself sat a few stools away.

I was interviewing him—or had been interviewing him—but once he'd heard her question, he couldn't concentrate on anything else. “Is this a chain?” he asked himself. “Well, we're not the dog on a fucking leash, I can tell you that. We're just a link in the chain. Hopefully a good link.”

How does one become the best pizza chef in America? Let us zoom backward, as if this were a comic book, to see his “origin story.” First panel: Rowdy, hardscrabble kids goof around in a back alley in New York—perhaps they play street ball. Next panel, say a third floor window: a saddened child looks down, wishing he could play, too—but he can't; he has asthma. Last panel: Young Chris is slumped in the corner, turned away from the window, knowing he can't go outside—but, curiously, he doesn't look sad. His eyes are somehow bright—he's watching the magic happening at the stove; he's reading his aunt's
Gourmet
magazines.

Next page of the comic book: TEN YEARS LATER! We see a young man-boy Bianco leaving the little shop in the Bronx, Mike's Deli, where he learned to make the magnificent mozzarella that would be a key weapon in his utility belt.

Bianco drops out of high school, but finds salvation in restaurant work. “I started to cook,” he told me, “because I felt incredibly insecure. I needed to know, we need to know, that it's all right. That's why we cook, why we break bread, why we offer someone a pint. To feel it's all right.”

And then, Bianco's big ticket out was an actual ticket. Bianco won a plane ticket to anywhere in America, and so he chose . . . Phoenix? He still can't say why, but apparently his instinct was well founded. “When I got here, I felt connected.”

To finish up this history, a rapid montage: See Bianco making mozzarella in his little Phoenix apartment, then selling it at the back door of various Italian restaurants. See Bianco being offered a small corner at a local grocery—a little corner with a wood-burning stove where he could try to make some pizza. See the pizza sell extremely well. See a thought balloon form above Bianco's head: “I could open my own pizza shop.” See Bianco work for a few years as a sous chef. See Bianco travel through Italy, sharpening his skills. See Bianco return to Phoenix.

See him open Pizzeria Bianco.

•

Bianco made such good pizza that after just four years there were lines around the block on Saturday nights. You can still find these lines. The original Pizzeria Bianco hasn't expanded from its original small space, and it doesn't take reservations.

But Bianco is still focused on the present, and on the future. If you want to talk about his past, he'll want to talk about his new restaurant. “It just felt right,” he said. “I mean, maybe it's that I'm getting older. I think I start to think about what I want to leave behind.”

Right or not, he said that expansion had been “the last thing I wanted to do. [But] it's like with a puppy or a significant other,” he said. “When you're looking? Very hard to find. But if you're not looking . . .”

When you're not looking, you find the perfect space in downtown Tucson. “Tucson has always been a place of respite for me,” he said. “An incredible concentration of all the things I love, in art, architecture, music—it's a place that's always inspired me. And there's a movement here now, with food—is ‘movement' the right word? You tell me, is it a movement? Yeah. Cool. I think so, too.”

It's notoriously difficult to pin down a time to talk to Chris Bianco, given that, in spite of his expansion, he still works lunch shifts at the original Pizzeria Bianco. But then again, he's a busy man, all around. “I'm having a child,” he said. Then clarified, “I mean, my wife is having a child. Soon.” As I walked into the semiconstructed space of his new restaurant in Tucson, I couldn't help but hear the words of my brother-in-law, himself a recent first-time parent: “During the pregnancy, your wife spends all this time with the child, she does all the hard stuff,” he said, “but I didn't know what to do with my nervous energy. So I just built the nursery.”

Though Bianco and his group have owned the new space for over a year, the opening date keeps being pushed back. “I hear what people are saying, ‘When will it open? When will it open?' But it's like with a baby. There's the day of conception, and then the due date [and] there's some time between,” he said. “But I guess the good news is that with the baby and the restaurant, I'm in it for the long haul. We're not creating a space just to flip it. We want to do a thing that is forever.”

Bianco showed me the small wall in the new restaurant where
he'll display paintings made by his father, a lifelong painter. “He's 86,” Bianco said, “but he's still painting!” And so, one wall of the restaurant will display the man's work. “My friend, Bill Steen, has this photo of Churro lambs. Out in the desert. My father loved that photo. So he's painting it. How cool is that? Say we roast a Churro lamb. And serve it on pizza, here? Say people can have a pizza with meat served from the lamb they see painted on the wall? Full circle,” he said. More full circling: Bill Steen's son built one of the large tables that diners will soon sit at—a beautiful table, with weird whorls overlaying various veils and veldts of varnish, layers beneath layers.