La Piazza al Forno
- Posted by Pizza Locust on June 17th, 2009 filed in Arizona, Glendale, Pizza
- 7 Comments »
Never let it be said that TV is a complete wasteland. Recently, I was skimming channels when what did I see but a Food Network piece on an Arizona pizzeria. I expected it to be about Chris Bianco’s place, but I was pleasantly surprised when it was about a restaurant I’d never heard of: La Piazza al Forno, in downtown Glendale. It looked to be a wood-fired brick oven style pizza, just exactly in line with what I like, so I knew I had to to try it. It also looked like it had a lot more seating than the excellent Pizza A Metro, which is nearer my home, but only has about 10 seats and is a bit difficult to wrangle the family into.
Our first try, just a couple days after the Food Network program aired was met with frustration, there were simply too many people waiting to get in, and I had a car full of hungry kids.
Today, my second attempt was alone, and just as the restaurant opened. I’ve made it a long-standing policy to never test a pizza restaurant just as they open because they rarely seem to have the oven “right” for the first few, but this was the only opportunity I’m going to have for a few more days and I was eager to try them.
I think my long-standing policy remains a good one, and this pizza was a perfect example of why I adopted it in the first place.
Let’s come to that later, and let’s start with the good stuff.
The review pizza was a 12″ pizza with sopressata taking the place of the standard pepperoni. (When salami or sopressata are available, I’ll usually choose them over pepperoni). Service was efficient and the pizza was prepared quickly. I’m reasonably sure it was the first pizza of the day, as there was only one customer before me. The restaurant really started to crowd up around 11:30.
The pizza is cooked under a high temperature brick oven, right next to the coals, and therefore cooks very quickly. These type of pizzas (Grimaldi’s is another example) often place the cheese under the sauce in order to prevent burning. Personally, I like a bit of lightly browned cheese so I prefer cheese on top, but if the ingredients are right and the pizza well-cooked, I don’t mind either way.
The sopressata was excellent. Flavorful with a somewhat unexpected zing.
The sauce was just about perfect, somewhat tart, with plenty of flavor.
The cheese… well, here’s where the first problem occurred. Taken as a bite of cheese, the mozzarella a good, soft mozzarella. If I had to guess, I’d say it was either freshly made or of the type that is often packaged in water. This type of mozzarella typically doesn’t have a lot of flavor when eaten uncooked. That was the first problem here. The mozzarella had barely been melted and in places was still in small chunks. The cook time on the toppings wasn’t quite enough.
The crust was the other area. Again, it was cooked beautifully on top, and had the potential to be excellent, but the bottom was blackened throughout. It was so burnt in places that it was leaving charred flour residue all over the place, including on my lips, which I was still tasting (instead of pizza) after I left the restaurant. That wasn’t so good.
I was left with the impression that this could have been a great pizza, marred by the oven temperature environment not being quite right yet. My next attempt – and there will be a next attempt – will be towards the end of lunch hour rather than at the start.
In the meantime, working on the assumption that the burnt bottom wasn’t intentional, I’ll give the restaurant a strong recommendation – pending further tests. 
5803 W Glendale Ave
Glendale, AZ 85301
(623) 847-3301
12″ sopressata pizza, $11 or $0.10 (0.097) per square inch
Update: June 20, 2009
I returned with the whole family for a second try, this time around 1:30PM. The restaurant was mostly full and the pizzas were flying out of the oven.
My wife tried the seafood pasta (frutti de mare), my daughter the baked meat lasagna and my son and I split another sopressata pizza.
My wife reports the seafood was good and the sauce had a bit of a zing, which she liked. The lasagna, which I also sampled was very good and very heavy on the sausage. The sausage was excellent, too.
Oh course, what I really wanted to know is if the bottom of my pizza was burnt again.
It wasn’t.
It looked perfectly cooked, top and bottom, but my only complaint was that the middle was so soggy you couldn’t cut it, it just smeared apart when I touched it with a knife.
That said, without the burnt bottom of the other day and in spite of the center being soggy, this was the best tasting pizza I’ve ever had in the Phoenix metro area. It really is a fine-tasting pizza, and in particular the flavor of the sauce and the sopressata really stood out.
August 16th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Good to hear. I just saw this one on the Food Network. I live in Mesa so I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to make the drive out there. I guess I will have to try it. Hmmm, if dinner is always slammed I am not sure when will be a good time! Thanks for the review. You really helped me make my mind up!
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:26 pm
I tried this place today. I was very disappointed from the moment we arrived, and it continued to get worse. To begin, we called ahead, as recommended on their website, around 4:45 p.m., preparing for a 6:00 p.m. gathering of 6 people. We were warned it was not a reservation, but we were assured the wait would be less than 10 minutes.
Our entire party arrive about 5 minutes early (5:55 p.m.). I introduced myself to the hostess and mentioned I’d called ahead. She said they didn’t have any tables available, and the wait would be 25 minutes. Wow, quite a bit more that we’d expected, but didn’t consider that to be too extreme. So, we waited.
There is no waiting area, except to stand out on the street. Very uncomfortable in the afternoon in the valley.
As we waited, there were about 4 or 5 families of 2 to 4 people people who arrived after us and were seated immediately. My wife and I both reminded the hostess we were still waiting, but they said our table was almost ready. They had an empty 4-person table in a corner, but there was nothing near it to expand to 6.
After 30 minutes, I asked to speak with the manager. When she came over, I attempted to convey my dissatisfaction by repeating the events that occurred. She had the gall to defend it; stating the 8-person table is only allowed for groups of 8, not 6.
At 6:40, they brought in and seated a group of 8 that arrived at 6:30, they also “called ahead”. They had moved two 4-person tables together to fit 8. I got up and headed to the door, at which time they said our table was ready. It turned out to be a different table for four that they moved away from the wall and added 2 chairs. It was extremely cramped at the table, to say the least. We stuck around because we were hungry, with the hope that the food would be better than the service.
We ordered salad and 2 pizzas. The salad was good. However, the first of the 2 pizzas was delivered about 1 minute after the salad. When the second pizza arrived, it was placed under the pizza stand, directly on the table, below the first pizza. We had our table full; salad serving bowl, salad plates, pizza stand, two pizzas, pizza plates and drinks.
As for the pizza, I can’t offer a good opinion of the taste of the pizza, because by the time I finished a half plate of salad, the pizza crust had become soft.
When we received the check, it already had a gratuity added. I asked to have that removed, and the waitress obliged. This must have finally got peoples attention. After I paid without a tip, a gentleman who was in the kitchen, came over and introduced himself as the owner. I explained the story, again, but he insisted there was no other way they could have accommodated me.
October 28th, 2009 at 6:46 am
You know…I just didn’t have the best experience:
http://eatingtheroad.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/la-piazza-al-forno/
November 1st, 2009 at 11:33 am
That’s really a shame. There’s never an excuse for bad service.
As you can see above, I’ve heard other complaints about the service. I haven’t experienced that, but I do my damnedest to avoid peak times. Nothing gets me into an unfavorable pizza-reviewing mood than bad service before the pie even arrives.
I can see from the comments on your review the owner is “defending” themselves on some rather shaky ground.
I particularly dislike the implied ad hominem attack “are you a food critic?” What really does one need to be a food critic – other than be a customer of that establishment? You sell a product, people consume the product, each and every one of them has the right to their opinion about it and critique it – even if they’ve never had anything other than Peter Piper Pizza in their lives.
You could serve feces on a ritz cracker to some food critics in the newspapers and if you gave them enough wine, they’d write a rave review about it. The only real merit in a “professional” critic is that they have a body of work with which to compare one’s own taste against. Find one you trust and stick with them.
The whole nonsense about Neapolitan pizzas is a silly dodge also. Neapolitan is trying to be protected as more-or-less a local trade name, not unlike Champagne, but sparkling wine is really just the same thing and can be better than the so-called “real” stuff. If if I recall correctly, “real” Neapolitan pizza only comes in two or three variants, all of them rather plain: Margherita or less.
In my book, they’ve got gall to even call crust with feta cheese and creamy pesto sauce a pizza, let alone Neapolitan pizza. I utterly detest these bizarre variants, designed, I’ve always assumed, for people who don’t actually like pizza. I try to stay out of that argument completely because that’s a matter of personal taste, but, if they’re going to try to claim the high ground, they’ve got some pretty big cajones to try to defend your Neapolitan Pizza and then allow feta cheese and pesto to be put on it. I do take it that his point is to be referring to the crust only, but that isn’t what the definition is.
On the other hand: shame on you for being talked into a non-pizza in the first place.
Looking back on my review, which covered two visits in short succession, and a couple additional trips since then, I’d sum it up like this: Crust – hit and miss on the cooking, it’s certainly not consistent. Tomato sauce, excellent. Sopressata, excellent. Mozzarella, bland, but not offensive – absolutely typical for homemade mozzarella, though. Overall excellent tasting if they’d just get their crust consistent.
November 15th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Wow! I just saw your response here. That’s quite a diatribe and I agree wholeheartedly with everything you’ve said. You can see from the comments on my write-up that Justin came around a little bit. I don’t mind him coming after me a little but I do think he jumped to the whole “what makes you you a critic” thing too quickly and got really defense from the beginning. I find the whole “real” Napolentana thing a bit much too. Either make good pizza or don’t…it’s not something complicated. I could care less if all the mysterious criteria are met…what I really cafe about is how my belly feels afterward
Keep up all the awesome eating and writing you’re doing!!
November 15th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
I admit, I was rather hot under the collar at the time.
Under cooler circumstances, I probably would just go with the following:
Not everyone agrees on what a good pizza is.
)
Everyone is entitled to an opinion.
The ultimate test of a pizza is how it pleases the person consuming it, not some arbitrary rules defining it. (Even though I have my own arbitrary rules defining pizza…
February 9th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
I went into this great place after seeing it on the Food Network. Totally lived up to my expectations and actually exceeded them. Fresh ingredients are key and Justin really let the flavors come through in the sauce and the use of fresh mozzarella. Service was very good and we ordered a salad before the pizza which was also very tasty. My husband and I will return here and become regulars. I’m sure a busy place is busy because something about the restaurant will keep people coming back. In this case, it’s the pizza. Good job, Piazza al Forno!