What You See is What You Eat.

It might be a bit pointless to review Pizzeria Mozza, because it already has had a plethora of stunning, orgasmic reviews since the second before it opened, but I’ll do a brief one anyway. This will have to be without pictures – this meal was on business, the result of what my firm calls a “mentoring lunch” which translates to “good restaurant + uncomfortable topics about my career, or, possibly, lack thereof, with my mentor whose name is several lines higher than mine on the letterhead.”

Pizza is a funny thing. When I was a kid, it was such a treat. We only got pizza from Pizza Hut when: 1) my dad got a bonus, or otherwise came to receive some extra monies; 2) my mom did not want to cook; 3) my dad let my mom not want to cook; and 4) she had a coupon, usually for two large Meat Lovers (trademark) for $9.99, carryout only (my parents adamantly refused to get delivery because they (or my dad) did not believe in tipping). There was never anything else; no hot wings, no breadsticks. We were lucky to get a thin crust instead of the usual pan crust (my dad believed that the thin crust used less bread and therefore, we lost money if we ordered that instead of the thicker pan crust).

In college, I lived in a Pizza Hut black hole in which two Pizza Huts, approximately equidistant from my apartment, each claimed that I was in the delivery area of the other. I ping ponged between the two of them until they both agreed that neither served my area. Didn’t matter too much, though, as the annual issue of the Daily Cal always made sure I should be participating in the Pizza Death War between Fat Slice and Blondie’s. This, I never understood; no one seemed to realize that the Big Secret that: (shh): They tasted the same: gross. Really, the true winner was Cheeseboard Pizza, that lovely, lovely, tiny, jazz-playing, grab-a-slice-and-eat-on-the-median-take-that-Santa-Monica from yet another graduate of Chez Panisse across the street. $2.50/slice; gourmet pizzas with fresh ingredients, always topped off with too much olive oil. Delicious. That’s when I learned that there was more to pizza than gray, sad crusts and greasy pepperoni.

When I visited Seattle, we went to Tom Douglas’s Serious Pie, after an entire day of walking around, first to a famed dyke bar (The Wild Rose – which had an extremely, extremely oddly unorganized Soup Nazi way of ordering drinks at the bar), then to the Space Needle, and then back downtown. We were comple-tely exhausted, didn’t want anything fancy, wanted something that was warm and open. I remembered Serious Pie as the only Tom Douglas restaurant remotely in our price range, and luckily, were just near it. This is, what, weeks? after it had just opened; unlike Pizzeria Mozza, it wasn’t packed to the gills, just cozily filled with people sharing long bench tables, swapping tastes of wines, explaining where they bought their scarf (it is really cold there). They served big gourmet pizzas with fresh, local ingredients and, very importantly, excellent crusty, almost naan-like without being an actual naan, crust. I remember thinking at the time that This is the perfect place to be in Seattle. Something about the easy, natural emphasis on the freshness of very Pacific Northwest ingredients on a simple thing like pizza; something about how it was so efficiently run without relying on any hype – Seattle is a lesson for those MBAs looking to invest in a city – encapsulated Seattle for me, while also reminding me that they really need more good Asian places up there. Actually, they need more Asians, period.

So as I was sitting there thinking about this, it also made me sad that Los Angeles didn’t have better pizzerias.

And along came Pizzeria Mozza.