My best friend‘s husband is one of the pickiest eaters I know. He claims an allergy to all vegetation, likes all of the most boring items from chain restaurants (the Mr. Misty at Dairy Queen, chicken nuggets at McDonald’s), and so has to be in the mood to eat that his favourite chocolate bar is kept in the freezer because the mice would feast upon it in the months it takes him to consume it all.

But he loves Caffe DaVinci in the Upper Arlington neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. Every time I go back to my home state to visit my best friend, she and I try to convince her husband to come to Olive Garden with us (what?), and he instead tries to convince us to go to Caffe DaVinci. I’m used to underwhelming Italian food in NYC, so I usually suggest that he stay home by himself and eat his chicken nuggets, but one night, he finally got his way.

And that night, my life was forever changed. Because amidst the everyday spaghetti and chicken caesar wraps were the glorious words “Chicago Style Meatball Pizza”. I grew up on my mom’s thick crust pizza and took years to finally appreciate the floppy slices associated with NYC, so my mind immediately went back to Friday nights at home rolling out the dough and slopping on the sauce and piling on the cheese and pulling pepperoni out of bags and mushrooms out of cans (we were classy). But this ain’t yer mama’s pizza.

It’s a pizza bread bowl, people. And it is loaded with toppings. So many that the bowl split open in front. And having once asked for a bread bowl full of chicken salad instead of soup at Panera Bread despite public shame, bread bowls are kind of my thing.

Unlike the unseasoned marinara sauces of NYC, this sauce was rich with herbs and what tasted like hours simmering on a stove. The crust was just crusty enough to snap apart but just chewy enough not to flake all over me. I added the pepperoni to up the gluttony, and I’m not dramatizing when I say I’d be perfectly content if this was the only pizza I could eat for the rest of my life.

If there’s one thing I love about NYC, it’s that for every diehard fitness fanatic waiting impatiently at the gym’s front door at 6 a.m., there’s a fried pizza fanatic who thinks four pizzas for three people might not be enough food. It used to be that you had to go to Park Slope’s Chipshop for a deep-fried slice, but Forcella took the fried pizza from an outer borough novelty to a full-on Manhattan sensation. Of course I was interested from the words deep-fried and pizza, but it was New York magazine’s article about the new Don Antonio by Starita that made me finally put down my Papa John’s and venture to Midtown:

Just when you thought the market for Neapolitan pizza had reached saturation, along comes Kesté’s Roberto Caporuscio and his old mentor Antonio Starita, who’ve teamed up to open Don Antonio in Hell’s Kitchen next Tuesday, February 7. In certain pizza-world circles, this is huge — like Gennaro Lombardi rising from the grave to sling slices with Dom DeMarco. For the uninitiated, Starita is third-generation pizza royalty. Along with Sophia Loren, his family’s Naples pizzeria starred in the Vittorio De Sica film L’Oro di Napoli. The man has served pizza to popes. He has tomato sauce coursing through his veins. In short, there is nothing about dough he doesn’t know. His student, Caporuscio, the U.S. president of the Association of Neapolitan Pizza Makers, is no slouch either.

How could I resist when my friends The Pretender and Lucy invited me out on a whim one night last week? And luckily, Lucy had her camera on hand to take these glorious photos:

Potato Croquet, Arancini, Fritattine

Henry ordered these three starters–fried potato with homemade mozzarella and bread crumbs, a rice ball, and a spaghetti cake with baked Italian ham and mozzarella–and seemed pleased but not overwhelmingly excited by them. I really wanted a spaghetti cake of my own but knew I was already going to have a hard time finishing the four pizzas we’d ordered.

Margherita S.T.G.

The S.T.G. is for guaranteed typical specialty, the pizza by which to judge all other pizzas. Typical as it may have supposedly been, I was pretty impressed. It needed more basil, but the sauce–which seemed a weak tomato-only puree at first glance–was somehow extremely flavorful. The crust was this perfect not-too-burnt-and-crispy, almost-chewy texture, bready enough and airy enough to please everyone.

Montanara Starita

Despite the similar toppings, the fried pizza was wildly different from the S.T.G. Every bite was noticeably smoky, and well, the crust was something special: crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, like a funnel cake or a French fry. And with that specific French fry/funnel cake soaked-through-with-oil-ness. It’s a magical mix of frying and oven-baking, and it was my favourite of the four.

Racchetta

It’s shaped like a racquet! And the handle is full of cheese! And is a big disappointment!

Overall, this pizza was awesome, and I say that as someone who barely like vegetables on pizza at all, especially when those vegetables are mushrooms (half-blergh!) and tomatoes (double-blergh!). But these vegetables were cooked down so flavorfully and lent a level of heartiness to the pizza that meats don’t. The disappointment was in the handle, which was lightly stuffed with creamy ricotta cheese and should have been the best stuffed breadstick ever but was just sort of okay–not quite flavorful enough and not quite cheesy enough. I need some oregano stuffed into that sucker.

Vesuvio

With ricotta, mozzarella, and salami stuffed inside the crust and Italian ham, mushrooms, and basil on top, this is the pizza you order if you want to fill up on just one. We made the mistake of saving it for last and only ate half of it, because each piece feels like two. The spice of the salami contrasted the sweetness of the ham, and the cheese spilling out of the center made it a messy fork-and-knife feast.

The way that I defend chain pizzerias should give you some indication of how much I generally think New York pizza sucks. It’s not the style I mind–I’ve grown to love the huge floppy crust that you fold together so the grease can drip straight into your mouth–but I just find it so entirely flavorless.

Totonno’s is about as New York-y as pizza comes, with an owner who started at the famed Lombardi’s, a location on Coney Island, and a reputation known the world-over. And yet, I find myself somehow craving it. The crust is brick-oven-browned, a little crunchy on the outside to help it maintain its form. But more importantly, the toppings are so mountainous you rarely see the cheese through them.

And one of their available toppings is basil! Heaven. Indeed, Zagat said, “Only God makes better pizza.”

I have to admit that when I tried Totonno’s for the first time a couple of years ago, I thought it was just as bad as other New York pizzas. So either my tastes have matured, or my expectations are sufficiently lowered after five years of living here.

I love chain pizza. In order of preference, my favorites for years have been Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Donatos, Uno’s, and then Domino’s. I’m not embarrassed about it, nor do I think it indicates an inferior palate. In fact, my problem with pizza in New York City, which is held up as some sort of bastion of flavor and structure, is that it has neither. The sauce never has any spice*, the crust is always limp, the dough is either too moist or too dry, and the toppings are always sparse.

As a person who loves pizza–I mean really loves pizza–and could probably eat it for every meal every day , I was seriously disappointed when I moved here from Ohio and found that I actually preferred to eat chain pizza and that it’s very hard to find here and almost impossible to get delivered.

Luckily, there’s a Domino’s around the corner from my office, and luckily, all of my co-workers and I were curious about this new recipe they’ve been touting that supposedly includes:

• Buttery, garlic-herb crust
• A robust, spicy sauce
• Real cheese (hmm?)

So we had 20 medium two-toppings pizzas delivered last Friday, and here’s how mine looked:

That’s pepperoni and bacon, which I realize means there was no way this pizza could be bad, but I’m convinced this would have been a delicious pizza even plain. Let’s break it down:

• Buttery, garlic-herb crust? Check. The butter and herbs are actually visible on the crust and are evident in every bite. The crust wasn’t soggy, but it wasn’t so hard you had to rip it apart with your teeth. The garlic was very present, so I didn’t even need any of the dipping sauces it came with to give it a kick.

• Robust, spicy sauce? Definitely. Not spicy as in hot but spicy as in full of spices. And there was plenty of it, too, which is another complaint of mine when it comes to New York pizza.

• Real cheese? I didn’t notice a flavor change, to be honest, but there was definitely a lot more of it, and that’s important to me.

The toppings were abundant, the crust was thick on the end and thinner underneath as it should be, and . . . oh, yeah, did I mention it cost $5.99 for the whole medium pizza because we did the 3-for-$5.99-each deal? Like you’re going to resist that, no matter how you felt about Domino’s before.

I’d still probably list Pizza Hut as my favourite chain pizza, but Domino’s is certainly #2 for me now. If you can get past your elitist feelings about not dining at some local pizzeria that’s been serving the same flavorless crap for 150 years, I think you’ll like it, too. (Although you’ll note that I’m posting this on a Friday, when no one reads blogs, so fewer people will see how non-elitist I am.)

*Except for Two Boots, which was founded by people who love Cajun food and is therefore not normal.