Pizzeria Quotes

“So I march into this pizzeria, and smell hot cheese and basil and oregano and garlic and onions and maybe pepperoni in the air, and notice some youngsters and loud cowboys eating pizzas and drinking beer at wooden tables, and start studying all the scrumptious pies in the display case in front of the big oven. There's one with sausage and mushrooms and three cheeses, and one with bacon and charred peppers and black olives and shrimp, and another with tiny meatballs and broccoli and whole garlic cloves, and one called the Super Deluxe, with everything but the kitchen stove.”
― James Villas, Hungry for Happiness

“This is Portland pizza. Sarah Minnick barrels down I-5 last summer, fast and furious, homebound from a conference on Cascading grains in Mount Vernon. She can't wait to get back to Lovely's Fifty-Fifty, her North Mississippi Avenue restaurant, a sort of locavore pizza think tank. In the back seat: a cache of multicolored snapdragons. Flour to flowers, what grows around here drives Lovely's strange and wonderful flavor expeditions. Who puts snapdragons on pizza? (Who puts snapdragons on anything?) But Minnick is lost in a reverie. "Snaps, man, they're really hard to explain," she says when I happen to cold-call in the moment. "A little sweet, a little rosy, very floral." Her plan: confetti them over a bacon-cheese pizza--- a princess birthday party, with pork.”
― Ruth Reichl, The Best American Food Writing 2018: An Anthology of Wondrous Essays on How Food Redesigns Our World

“At Lovely’s, Minnick has emerged as the Alice Waters of pizza, with a near-spiritual connection to Oregon’s most adventurous farmers. She builds toppings from whatever they drop off— stinging nettles, quinoa greens, maybe bok choy raab, backed by unusual regional cheeses. Lovely’s makes its superb sourdough crust with locally milled grains that change with the season. The results may not be pizza as you know it. But I’m embarrassed for most other pies when I dig into one of these chewy, sour, flavor-rich wheels, and I may not be alone.”
― Ruth Reichl, The Best American Food Writing 2018: An Anthology of Wondrous Essays on How Food Redesigns Our World