Pizza Mari

I'll get right to it. Alex is making really solid pizza at Pizza Mari. 

Pizza Mare opened a few months ago, and I've been meaning to get over there to try so pizza since opening day. The shop hours right now are limited (Saturdays and Sundays 11-4, Friday afternoons just started) and will be expanding in the near future. For the incoming storm, a decision was made to close on Sunday and extend Saturday's hours through dinner time. Letting me know this important fact is probably the best use of Instagram in the last 10 years. When I followed the shop on Instagram a few months ago, Alex sent me a message. I am a combination of proud, humbled and embarrassed that I have been blathering on and on about pizza in various places online long enough that he recognized my screen name. 

All the kids are gone, so unlike my recent Romo's plan, I only went with two pizzas: a plain cheese (sauce, both fresh and aged mozzarella, Parmesan, olive oil and basil) and The Collar City (roasted oyster mushrooms, creme fraiche made in the shop, Jasper Hills Alpha Tolman cheese, aged mozzarella, pickled red onions and then finished with Parmesan, some microgreens, fresh cracked black pepper, and Sicilian olive oil) for a 6:30 pickup.  

I got there early to watch some pizza being made and maybe chat. The attention to detail in this shop is high. The dough is made with a blend of 5 flours. I am a pizza nut. I have never gone above three flours. The dough looks like it stretches really well. Toppings are strategically placed on a pizza, not just tossed on there. The oven is a PizzaMaster, looked like it was set around 650. I don't know enough about the ovens to know if that is both top and bottom. You can set them to be different temps. I also have mixer envy, there was a nice, big Sun spiral mixer there. I go back and forth between wanting a smaller Sun or Famag, and now since I've waited too long, Spiralmac has entered the conversation. I don't get a lot pizza in the Albany area, but one more detail: this is the first time I have seen Perfect Crust pizza box liners in the area. Maybe other places use them, I don't know. They are supposed to be the best at keeping the pizza warmer and preventing the bottom from steaming. I considered buying a box of them myself, but the majority of my to-go orders are across the street with no real travel time.

While the pizzas were made and cooked there was a nice conversation ranging from pizza places we've been to, my pizza experiences and the pizza community in general. The shop itself is small, at least the customer side, but nicely decorated and inviting. Everything about this place makes you really want to the pizza to be good. I had my handy pizza delivery bag to keep the pizzas toasty on the ride home.  If I speed, I can get pizza from Pizza Mari to my table in about 10 minutes. Obviously I sped to minimize any impact of the travel time. Here are the two pizzas. 

To me, the crust is the foundation of a pizza. The crust at Pizza Mari is very nice. It might be a little dark around the rim for some (the lighting and my lack of photography skills make the plain look a bit darker than it was), but who cares about those people. These are people that think pizza in New Haven is burnt too. The dough has a nice flavor with a little bit of sourdough coming through. Good texture too. There are three temperatures for eating pizza - hot/fresh out of the oven, room temperature, and cold. I'm not a reheat guy and this crust eats well at all three temps. This small sampling from Pizza Mari makes me want to go through the whole menu. Depending on when you catch them, slices are available. That might be a quicker way to try them all. A potato pizza that might be phased off the menu soon sounds very good, and so do the Carbonara, white pizza and tomato pie. I'm sure I'd like the Pep and Pepp which is pepperoni and hot pepper, but my wife doesn't do spicy. That'd be a good one for me to try as a slice.

The last time a local pizza shop made me think about possible changes to my own pizza was when I took the pizza class at DeFazio's way back in 2014. I messed around with some semolina in the dough for a while before phasing it out of my process. These two pizzas from Pizza Mari made me reflect on what I'm doing. First, I should look into expanding on the mushrooms I've been using. I've always gone with white button or crimini with a strong preference to smaller sized mushrooms (they slice and eat better). The oyster mushroom were really earthy and flavorful. Straight up delicious if you like mushrooms. And the other take away, I might also have to do restart doing poolish experiments with my dough making process. It's a quality pizza that makes you think about implementing aspects of it to improve your own pizza.

Swing and a miss

We really don't go out to dinner regularly. And me, ME, coordinating a handful of mouths to go out for pizza in the Albany area, basically unheard of. Don't think it has ever happened.

Thursday night, I loaded up the mini van with me, my wife, both daughters and a boyfriend and headed off to finally try Romo's Pizza. I'm excited. I've heard good things about it. I drove past the new, larger restaurant on my way to get apples for Thanksgiving. Pretty sure they had a pizza do well at the pizza convention in Vegas. Been meaning to go for a long time. It is incredibly rare for me to be excited about trying pizza this close to home. 

A co-worker offered some tips for things he and his wife had like there (they are regulars). In fact, I'm told last time they were there with their two kids, his wife asked, "What do you think Jon would say about this?" Now, I find that hilarious for two reasons. First, I have never met her or discussed pizza with her. Anything she knows about me and pizza is second hand from my coworker, who has been over to the house for my pizza - at least once a year I bring the gang over for pizza and call it team building. And second, I can't believe that anyone thinks about how I would react to a specific pizza. That's nuts.

So, we get to Romo's at 6:30. The parking lot was a little exciting, and I eventually find a spot to park the family truckster and we head inside. Looks crowded, but no lines and no customers standing. There is a completely open 6-top directly behind the host stand. Here we go.

Table for 5, please.

Do you have a reservation? 

I didn't know you took reservations (most pizza places don't unless it is for a large party, would have thought that started at 6 or 8).

We take them for parties of 5 or more. Unfortunately, we are completely booked up for the rest of the night. It's trivia night.

There's no more seats for the night?

No, I'm sorry.

OK. I thought trivia nights were in places that featured a bar. This looks like it has a bar, but it is mainly food. Not a place you would stop for a few beers. I also thought Trivia Nights were Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday to drive up traffic on slower nights. Thursday through Sunday, I would have expected a pizza place to want to turn over tables. 

There was a brief discussion about takeout, but I didn't want to do takeout pizza (depending on the place, it can really lose a lot in transit). We drove past something that looked like a Japanese restaurant on the way. The map on my phone said it was good so off we went. It was good, service was very friendly and we had a really nice time, but totally a swing and a miss. Probably late May will be the next time I have enough people at the house to order a lot of food at Romo's. Oh well. If current events teach us anything, there are much worse things than a failed pizza night.