The Pizza Locust

I’ve been looking forward to stopping in at Classic Italian Pizza in Tempe for some time now, but circumstance has kept me away – until last night when I found myself alone and hungry in Tempe after having helped a friend with an errand. The rough location of Classic Italian Pizza (“CIP”) was etched in my mind, and I was able to find it without much difficulty, but with a certain amount of luck. It’s really tucked away in the backside of the shopping center on Baseline between Rural & Lakeshore.

I arrived about 8:00PM, and there weren’t a lot of customers in the place. Only two tables were in use, and both had already completed eating. It’s a dark, pleasant restaurant with a dozen or so tables, a small bar and a shaded outdoor patio. Prominently displayed behind the bar is the wood-fired brick oven. Although not obvious inside the restaurant, outside, the tables proclaim that CIP won the ‘03, ‘04 and ‘05 “best pizza” award. I’m not sure whose best pizza award it was.

The menu is fairly simple and straightforward. All pizzas are 12″ and the toppings available are all the usual suspects. The menu does point out that they make their own dough, sauce, mozzarella and sausage and sell them “by the pound.” Handmade dough, sauce, mozzarella and sausage – if that didn’t sound like a sausage pizza asking to be eaten, I don’t know what does, so that’s what I ordered.

The pizza was cooked fast – really fast. Too fast. Perhaps it was because there was no other food being prepared and the oven was too hot or perhaps it was because the pizzaiolo (owner, I think) must have been seriously jonesing for a cigarette (he pulled my pizza from the oven, cut it, plated it, called the waitress, grabbed his smokes and hit the door like he was part of the Olympic smoke-break team) because the pizza wasn’t cooked quite right.

The edge of one or two slices looked like it is well-darkened, but, in fact, was a bit past that point and were burnt. Conversely, the underside was under-cooked and didn’t have any crunch to it, despite being a nice shade of brown. I recognize that high-temperature, wood-fired ovens require a lot more skill in adapting to the heating conditions, which change throughout the course of the day, so while disappointing it’s something I chalk up to the natural variability of hand-crafted pizzas. I’ve had the exact same experience at Patsy Grimaldi’s with their coal-fire oven pizzas and they’ve usually got a superior pie, so I expect this is not the norm at CIP, either.

Moving up to the cheese and the sauce. I honestly couldn’t tell for certain but I believe this pizza was of the cheese first, sauce on top variety. On the other hand, it may have been both sauce on top and down below. Sauce on top helps prevent the cheese from burning in high-temperature conditions, but also helps prevent the cheese from developing a nice golden brown, which is where mozzarella really begins to come into flavor. As such, the cheese was unremarkable.

The sauce was very good, and easily my favorite part of the pizza.

The sausage was a different story. One of the comments on my flickr photo of the pizza is that it is covered in slices of “blam” – that part-beef, part-lamb aggregate material used to make gyros at some restaurants. It’s not blam, it’s sausage, presumably Italian sausage. I can’t say I was particularly taken with it. The quantity was very generous. Partially that may have been to blame for the top not being particularly cooked, since there was very little surface area not covered by the sausage. The flavor of the sausage was very inconsistent. If you picked up a slice and ate it by itself, it was good odds that you might not realize it was supposed to be an Italian sausage. It wasn’t quite like a breakfast sausage, either. It was quite hard to explain. However, every once in a while, I’d get a bit with a strong traditional sausage flavor. It was almost as if the sausage ingredients hadn’t been mixed well before stuffing.

I’d be remiss not to point out that toppings are very expensive. While the 12″ pizza base is under $10, the sausage topping was nearly $4.00. Pepperoni is $3. Topping prices like that add up quickly, but perhaps discourage people from turning their pizzas into “garbage pies.”

Based on my experience with only this one pizza, I wouldn’t exactly recommend it, but it seemed as if there was a lot of potential that was just missed that day. I will certainly return and try again, and I will try pepperoni next time, preferably at a time when they are busier. At the same time, I certainly wouldn’t discourage anyone from going and giving it a try. I have a feeling you could really get an excellent pizza there under the right conditions.

Classic Italian Pizza
1030 E. Baseline RD, #156
Tempe, AZ 85283
(480) 345-8681

Cost: 12″ Sausage pizza, $13.90 or $0.12 (0.123) per square inch.
Note: This is the first pizza I’ve encountered where sausage and pepperoni are two different prices, therefore a standard pepperoni pizza would be $12.95 or $0.12 (0.115) per square inch.

Conclusion: Neutral, pending further test pizzas. In the meantime, I recommend you try this pizza if you’re in the area.

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