America’s best? Arizona’s Pizzeria Bianco delivers the goods
The scene: Pizzeria Bianco is one of the most important restaurants to open in my lifetime in terms of transforming America’s food scene. Recent years have seen a proliferation of high-quality foods in places outside their traditional regions, places they might not be expected to excel. The obvious example is barbecue, which can now be found at high levels from coast to coast. Other once geographically challenged foods that have spread nationwide with success range from fried chicken to banh mi sandwiches to gelato, not so long ago, hard to find outside of the South and large cities respectively. All of these owe a debt to pizza, the first comfort food to take high quality national and prevail amidst a landscape of delivery-chain mediocrity. It wasn’t that long ago when you would be challenged to find a standout thin crust example between the Northeast and San Francisco. That all changed with Pizzeria Bianco, which helped pave the way for all the other above mentioned foods, as well as the now ubiquitous Neapolitan-style brick oven pizzeria phenomenon.
The reason this temple to pizza exists, in of all places, downtown Phoenix, is because the climate suited owner Chris Bianco, whose pizza mania runs so deep that “passionate” is a gross understatement. Bianco grew up eating, then making, then greatly obsessing over the very nature of pizza in the Bronx and Westchester, N.Y., before heading west to work for restaurant legend Alice Waters, largely credited with pioneering the farm-to-table movement. Once Bianco realized that the key to sensational pizza was controlling his own quality ingredients, he packed up to Phoenix, where the things he needed, like arugula, basil and tomatoes, could be grown to his high standards all year-round.
Pizzeria Bianco opened in 1987 and moved to its current flagship location in historic Heritage Square, in the heart of otherwise modern Downtown Phoenix, in 1996. It occupies a former 1929 red brick machine shop that simply says Pizzeria Bianco in faded letters on the front, has a few outdoor tables, a few indoor tables, and the centerpiece, a large wood-burning oven. There are about a dozen two- and four-person tables and half a dozen bar stools, which is why nightly waits can routinely exceed two and even three hours. The feel is worn, comfortable and slightly industrial, with bare concrete floors and rustic wood furniture. Unlike most wood pizza ovens, this one is not a dome, stucco or tile, but a big cylindrical red brick structure that looks like part of castle. Because lines can be so long, Bianco opened another place around the corner where you can wait for your table at the main event. Bar Bianco serves antipasto platters with his house-cured meats and lots of wines by the glass – including hard-to-get Arizona varietals. There is a now a second branch of the pizzeria and a third location, Pane Bianco, a wood-fired sandwich shop that also serves his pizza, in Phoenix, plus a Pizzeria Bianco outpost in Tucson.
Reason to visit: Any pizza on the menu.
The food: I first ate at Pizzeria Bianco in 2009, and it rocked my world. It was the best pizza I’d ever had, and I’ve eaten at many of the top-ranked pizzerias around the world. To explain the importance of ingredients, Bianco, who can expound philosophically on the importance of all things pizza for hours (and hours), opened a bag of basil delivered that day by one of his farmers and the room exploded into a perfumed basil world. The arugula on the pizza was the only arugula I’ve ever had in this country that tastes like the finest version in Italy, peppery and flavorful in a way that leaves all other greens flat. He makes his own cheese, his own sausage, and so on, with every ingredient and every step carefully curated, something he learned under Alice Waters.
“If a recipe said salt and pepper, and you started thinking about, ‘well what kind of pepper?’ and ‘what kind of salt, is it Brittany, or fleur du sel? What’s the appropriate role for these ingredients?’ I was dumb enough, and I’m still dumb enough, to think that pizza was no different in that way ... it’s not rocket science, but I think it became much more than a food source. It has a pointy end, you know where to start, and the crust where you know you could finish, and there are a lot of subtleties, a lot of nuances to something as simple as pizza. It was always beautifully, simply, mysterious to me.”
This guy cares about pizza. While many comfort food places serving ribs, hot dogs, or burgers have won the American Classics Award from the James Beard Foundation, the chefs who make ribs, hot dogs, burgers -- or pizza -- do not win the coveted Best Chef award -- with the exception of Chris Bianco, the only pizza-making winner in history. Pizzeria Bianco has been named the nation’s (or world’s) best by everyone from Rachael Ray to Bon Appetit to Vogue. Pizza pundit Ed Levin, author of A Slice of Heaven, called it America’s best, while respected food critic Jeffrey Steingarten, author of The Man Who Ate Everything, rated it the finest on earth.
When I first visited, there was only one way to get this pizza: to head Downtown and wait forever, at dinner time. Now Pizzeria Bianco has a couple of satellite locations and is open for much more accessible lunch, but Bianco’s strict rules still apply, such as no take-out, because the pizza is meant to be eaten right out of the oven, and no reservations, because the wait enhances the spiritual experience. “People wait two hours and it’s mind-numbing and they’re cursing me, like ‘Man, this (expletive) better be good,’ and I’ve heard that every (expletive) day for 20 years. It’s a challenge and I’d be lying if there’s not a part of me that wants to say, ‘You know what, it’s 23 hours to fly to (expletive) Australia, and I’d like it to be 15 minutes, but it’s not. And that’s part of that experience.”
For almost two decades, Bianco made just about every pizza personally, but the endless process took a toll, and he had to finally cede some control to his staffers, which is why he can now do lunch and multiple eateries. Some critics say the pizza has suffered as a result, but this belief is far from widespread; just four months ago food-obsessed website Eater.com wrote a feature with the headline “20 Years In, Chris Bianco is Still America’s Best Pizza Maker.”
I returned most recently this January and for the first time ever had lunch -- and pizza not made by Bianco himself. I admit, other than the fact that there was no wait, I was a tiny bit disappointed, as the pizzas were merely great, and not quite the transcendent world’s best I had become used to. Still, the A-minus effort at Pizzeria Bianco trumped just about any other pizza I could think of. The crust walks a perfect fine line between crisp and chewy, with a wonderful charred, blistered, puffy outer crust, and every individual ingredient shines.
Once you get past all the mystique, the menu itself is straightforward, short and sweet with just three salads, six pizzas and two appetizers, one of them an antipasto plate only offered at dinner. I tried the other, the spiedini, skewers of fontina cheese wrapped in organic prosciutto and cooked in the pizza oven. They were really good, warm but not too oozy, with the cheese and ham perfect complements. Everyone gets homemade bread from the brick oven, and it should probably be skipped to leave room for pizza, but it’s warm, really good, and hard not to eat, with a chewy (in a good way) crust and not all chewy interior.
The slate of pizzas is offered at all locations, and each is pretty simple, with ingredients carefully combined because they suit each other. There is a marinara with no cheese, classic margherita, the Sonny Boy with mozzarella, salami and olives, the Rosa with red onions, parmesan and delicious crushed pistachios, and the Wiseguy, with oven roasted onions, smoked mozzarella and extremely flavorful house-made fennel sausage - Men’s Health proclaimed it the single best pizza in America. To keep flavor profiles simple, Bianco never puts on more than one meat, and while I love both salami and sausage, here my recurring favorite is the stunning Biancoverde, a white pizza topped with his farmed explosive arugula. But the Wiseguy, Rosa and Sonny Boy are all impossible to stop eating as well.
Pilgrimage-worthy?: Yes. If you are a pizza fan (and who is not?) there’s no place outside Naples more important to visit.
Rating: OMG! (Scale: Blah, OK, Mmmm, Yum!, OMG!)
Price: $$ ($ cheap, $$ moderate, $$$ expensive)
Details: Original, 623 East Adams Street, Phoenix; 602-258-8300; three other locations in Phoenix and Tucson; pizzeriabianco.com
Larry Olmsted has been writing about food and travel for more than 15 years. An avid eater and cook, he has attended cooking classes in Italy, judged a barbecue contest and once dined with Julia Child. Follow him on Twitter, @TravelFoodGuy, and if there's a unique American eatery you think he should visit, send him an email at travel@usatoday.com. Some of the venues reviewed by this column provided complimentary services.