Delicio

A Neapolitan-ish coal-fired pizza, featuring leopard spotted crust, and located within @hoppinvines. In my experience, coal-fired pizza is pretty much always great. The earliest American pizzerias were coal-fired (like Lombardi's & @totonnospizza). These places evolved out of bakeries, using their large coal-fired bakery ovens. Usually coal-fired pizzerias produce something between Neapolitan & New York style, reflecting that they represent a partial American evolution away from the old world methods. In this, Delicio leans a bit more towards Naples (perhaps just off the coast of Portugal).

Earlier visit — Dec 2013

Delicio opened as Cincinnati’s first coal-fired pizzeria, and I was eager to try it. The great old coal-oven pizzerias of the East Coast use intense, dry heat to produce something between Neapolitan and New York pizza: large, crisp, well done, and lightly charred.

The coal-fired billing led me to expect something close to that tradition. Delicio’s crust largely fit the model, though its sauce, cheese, and toppings took the pizza in a heartier (Midwestern?) direction. The result was quite good.

The Perfect Pepperoni had one of the better crusts I had encountered in Cincinnati. It was crisp and sturdy, though another 30 seconds in the oven might have given it the deeper char I prefer. The sauce tasted mostly of pure tomatoes. It was plain on its own but worked well as part of the pizza. The thick pepperoni curled into crisp little cups, which I loved.

Delicio used considerably more cheese than the classic East Coast coal-oven places. That could easily have overwhelmed the crust, but the cheese was flavorful and avoided the cheap, greasy quality common to heavily topped pizzas.

This was a well-crafted, substantial pizza without the pretension of some Neapolitan restaurants. There was nothing else quite like it in Cincinnati at the time, and it was well worth trying.