PHOENIX — I was well in my fourth hour waiting for what was declared “the best pizza in America” when the realization hit me: I could have driven from my house back in New Jersey to any of the hundreds of perfectly delightful pizzerias in our state in the time I spent lingering here, stomach growling, patience running on empty.
It better be good.
No, scratch that.
It better be the best.
The name of the place is Pizzeria Bianco, and yes, to say I was skeptical that the nation’s best pizza could be found in downtown Phoenix — in Ari-flipping-zona — was an understatement. Still: You couldn’t spend even half a day here without someone in town for Super Bowl LVII telling you how great the place is.
I heard it from football fans. I heard it from locals. I heard it from other sportswriters, and while we hardly qualify as food critics, we are seasoned professionals when it comes to eating well on an expense account while traveling.
“It’s worth the wait,” one of them told me.
But more than three hours?
Could any pizza be worth THAT wait?
That was time quoted to our party of four when we arrived at 6:15 p.m. on a Thursday. The city was buzzing with not only the Super Bowl in town but the PGA’s Waste Management Open in nearby Scottsdale, but the restaurant employees assured us that the wait was not because of the special events in town. The place was almost always this crowded.
The glowing reviews are no doubt part of the reason. The 2005 book “Slice of Heaven” declared it the best pizza in America, and it has received similar accolades from the Food Network, the New York Times, Gourmet, Martha Stewart Living and Vogue. Its owner, Chris Bianco, has won the prestigious James Beard Award.
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So, yeah, this is a foodie’s pizza joint. Among the people waiting for a table on this night — and, as we discover later, waiting for a much shorter time than us — was Ryan Fey, host of the Food Network’s “Grill Dads.” Bianco doesn’t deliver or even do takeout. If you want its pizza, you have to pack your patience and grab a seat.
And Bianco’s capitalizes on that waiting. Most customers head next door to a bar with tables, leather seats and board games. We played a few dozen rounds of Apples-to-Apples and sucked down several pints of “Crispy” beer while we waited, and waited, and waited. Three times, a man from the restaurant stopped where we were sitting to ask for our name — checking, presumably, to see who among the people who submitted their names for the three-hour wait were actually waiting.
USA Today gushed that “the wait enhances the spiritual experience,” but the customers around us weren’t exactly singing kumbaya. It’s not Bianco’s fault that people like it and are willing to wait for it. But isn’t a big part of pizza’s allure the ease by which you can acquire it? Pizza is a 20-minutes-or-less delivery, a Wednesday night parent saver.
It was 9:26 p.m. when he finally took our seat with a view of the brick oven, and 25 minutes later, we finally got our pizza. At that point, I would have eaten a stale English muffin with spaghetti sauce from a jar and declared it the nation’s finest.
It didn’t have to be the best after three and a half hours. It just had to be edible. It just had to be sustenance.
And, sure, it was delicious.
We ordered six pies, and the “Wiseguy” with wood-roasted onions, house smoked mozzarella and fennel sausage was the table’s favorite. The crust was crispy, maybe even a little too charred, and the ingredients were as fresh as advertised.
Best pizza in America, though? Sorry, it didn’t “rewire my synapses,” as one breathless review had claimed. Give me the Star Tavern in Orange. Give me a large pie from a half dozen other places just a short drive from my house.
Oh, and most of all, give it to me in less than three and a half hours.
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Publish date : 2023-02-10 23:35:00
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