"I want your job," a local casino president told me after I informed him that a visit to the International Pizza Expo was on my agenda that afternoon. "What a coincidence," I shot back. But maybe he had a point.
Pizza is allegedly the most popular food in the world. According to Ed Levine, author of the just- published Pizza: A Slice of Heaven: The Ultimate Pizza Guide And Companion, Americans consume $33 billion worth of pizza annually, from some 63,873 pizzerias. Yikes!
A good number of them seem to have been represented at this expo, held last week at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Picture the world's biggest pizza party. We're talking about a gigantic hall chockablock with booths serving chicken wings, olive salads and creatively topped pizzas, with enough variety for several months' sampling.
Essentially a trade show, it featured booths serving up edibles such as sauces, crusts, condiments, desserts, seasonings, sprays, cheeses, cookies, oils and ice creams, not to mention equipment like ovens, racks, menu boards, delivery bags, packaging machinery, cleansers, dough mixers and promotional items galore. In short (whew!), just about anything an aspiring pizza- maker could ever want.
The expo was sponsored by Pizza Today magazine, which goes into these subjects in great depth. Walking the floor, fighting over fare like Italian-style hot wings and the Harvest pizza (a creation topped with chicken, pine nuts and raisins), I felt my blood turning into Roma tomato sauce and the putative calorie count reaching 3,000 before I had even covered a tenth of the exhibition.
Still, I soldiered on. And when I had finished my odyssey, I came away with one salient piece of wisdom: It's the dough, stupid.
Great dough makes great pizza, especially when done in a wood-fired oven, preferably made of brick. This type of oven is found in the great pizza houses like Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Il Forno in Providence, producing a light, airy, bubbly crust both chewy and crisp at the same time.
Often , these masterful crusts are slightly blackened on the bottom, absorbing sauce and cheese the way a black hole sucks up a galaxy. Does any crust in Vegas come up to this standard? None that I know of.
But Las Vegas is home to good, if not great, pizza. A few that spring to mind are the thin-crust pizza at Smith and Wollensky; the potato, shallot and Fontina cheese pizza at Lupo in Mandalay Bay; a plain cheese pizza at Rocco's New York Deli; and just about anything at Northside Nathan's, an underrated pizza place on West Lake Mead Boulevard.
Great dough has to contain the perfect amount of yeast, be hand-stretched, and rise at the correct temperature. (To read further on the subject, may I suggest Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything and his lightly seasoned Pizza Perfection—everything you ever wanted to know about dough.)
Thing is, I didn't taste any extraordinary crust at the Pizza Expo, either, despite the presence of wood-oven vendors and booths hawking "new-age" crusts, pita crusts, frozen crusts, pre-baked crusts, par-baked crusts, and even various Frankenfood innovations.
I did take heart when I ran into Sam Facchini, owner of one of our best chains—Metro Pizza—doing his homework tasting and snooping, but I did not, on the convention floor, taste as much as one crust the equal of a hot, fresh Metro pie.
My own personal ne plus ultra of pizza these days is at Pizzeria Bianco in downtown Phoenix, where a James Beard Award-winning chef named Chris Bianco runs a place that is roughly the equivalent of the room run by Seinfeld's Soup Nazi. Bianco opens his doors at 5 p.m. to a brick pizza hut that seats 42. I arrived at 4:30 last month, and to my dismay, found 110 people in a line ahead of me. "8:15," said the hostess, when we got to the door. "And we come out every half hour, to see who's still here."
I didn't wait around that evening, ignoring the protestations of my wife, who was totally psyched for pizza. But I can tell you that the two times I have managed to get in, the pizzas were the best I've ever tasted, from the crust—lightly mottled with homemade sauces and various whole-milk cheeses—to Bianco's own homemade salamis and herbs straight out of his garden. Is any pizza worth waiting three hours for? Sure, if you're hungry.
In the end, I was disappointed with the expo. I'm not much for deep-dish, Chicago-style pizza, but I didn't find any being served there. The wood ovens may have been for sale, but they were not used. Many of the pies being served were frozen-dough pizzas, and after all, how good can they be?
I'll keep searching for that Holy Grail of pizza here in Vegas, but I won't spend too much energy looking for it in a hall that relies on frozen dough and stainless-steel ovens.