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HOUSTON BUSINESS JOURNAL, 2005
Candelari's Pizzeria:
A limited menu allows focus on specialty
By: HBJ Gourmet / Houston Business Journal
Published: Week of November 4-10, 2005
Kirby Drive and Richmond Avenue outside the Loop have each sometimes been called Restaurant Row. With a branch of Star Pizza dispensing excellent pies on one end and the new Candelari's Pizzeria baking perhaps even better specimens on the other, Washington Avenue could well be dubbed Pizza Parkway.
Located at the roundabout that connects Washington and Westcott, Candelari's is an offshoot of the original, tiny Candelari's on Bissonnet. Its pizzas a showcase for the proprietor's superb sausages, the spin-off operation has a warm, airy feel thanks to the inviting deck, pale tan stucco walls, darkwood floors and banquettes, burnished copper tabletops, old fashioned ceiling fans, wide brick archways and tall vases full of cherry sunflowers. All those hard surfaces (the booth benches even lack padding) make for noisy dinning, though especially when the television is on and people talk over it to have a conversation.
As befits a neigboorhood pizzeria, the atmosphere is cozily relaxed. The youthful staff is amiably laid-back, and is really not all that involved in your dining experience. After perusing a big menu board, you order and pay at the counter and get your own utensils, napkins, soda and tea (including a black currant variety) from another table. The food is brought to you when it's ready.
Candelari's menu is so short that garlic bread and cheese-topped focaccia are needed to flesh the list of appetizers out to a half a dozen items. The fried calamari and shrimp plate was appealing with the slight toughness of the squid ringlets offset by the succulence of the quartet of shrimp, and the breading on both had a fetching spicy zip. That went double for the aptly peppery Buffalo wings, which can be had in either a mild barbecue version, which smacks more of Houston than Buffalo, or a spicy garlic incarnation, which seems much more to the point.
Mellowness was the hallmark of the spinach and artichoke dip, which featured lots of spinach, a few traces of artichoke, and just enough startlingly rich cheese to make everything luxuriously spreadable on slices of toasted baguette.
There are several items on the menu for people who, for reasons I can't imagine, might not want pizza. These include pasta dishes, salads (chicken, tuna, Caesar and Greek) and various sandwiches including an Italian sausage "grinder" which is the Yankee term for po' boy. And for the mythical kid who might want an alternative to a slice or two, there are macaroni and cheese, chicken tenders and grilled cheese sandwich.
The pastas I sampled were enjoyable if unremarkable. Pasta Beatrice is fettuccine tossed with morsels of grilled chicken and sun-dried tomato pesto and topped with a slice of walnut-crusted goat cheese. Pasta primavera is penne freshened with pieces of squash, tomato, canned artichokes and grilled eggplant, all moistened with a garlic olive oil. In both cases, the pasta was cooked well past al dente. But all these things are merely diversions from Candelari's main attraction: Its great pizzas, especially those made with its signature sausages.
I didn't try the allegedly healthier five-grain crust, but I can vouch for the two white-flour kinds: The deep-dish Chicago style and the only slightly thinner New York style. Candelari's bakes its pies in a hulking, black, slightly battered-looking stone-floored oven that's reportedly set at 500 degrees and requires the pizzas to be rotated 180 degrees halfway through the cooking process for even browning. But while the crust on both pies I sampled were cooked through and even a little blackened on the bottom, neither emerged from the oven with a cracker crisp veneer.
Pizza's toppings matter more than their bottoms, of coarse and Candelari's are tops.
The andouille and smoked chicken and apple sausages had to go unexplored, as did the vegetarian pizzas. But the original Italian, chicken and sun-dried tomato, and smoked turkey and jalapeno sausages were the stars of the two pies I sampled.
The Gunslinger Pizza features slices of turkey and jalapeno sausage plus cilantro, slivers of red onion, bits of bacon and ground sirloin, sliced jalapenos to ensure a high heat index, and a thin, nongloppy crown of provolone cheese.
Less fiery but just as flavorful was the King Mike's pie, made with crumbled Italian and chicken sausages, pesto sauce, roasted garlic, bacon, pebbles of feta cheese and thin ribbons of portobello mushroom. The first thing I did when it arrived was pop a bit of Italian sausage into my mouth, and it was love at first bite. With charcuterie as good as this, the plethora of meats on the T-Rex pizza is superfluous.
The menu offers New York cheesecake, fudge brownies and crisp king size chocolate-chip cookies for dessert, but (the cashier told me) the cheesecake was store-bought while the manager struggled to master the recipe, and they were out of brownies that night I wanted one. To sample the in-house pastries, I guess I'll just have to revisit this outstanding pizzeria.
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