Sazza

But that didn't mean the newfangled pizza tasted better. In fact, when I first visited Sazza — the organic, sustainable, earth-friendly pizza joint that Jenni and Jeff Rogoff opened in June 2006 in the back of an enormous strip mall — its pizza was terrible. Dry, dusty crusts, red sauce that fairly sizzled with overburdening and unnecessary herbs, and awful combinations of buzzy ingredients. Duck. Rosemary. Fig. Cilantro, which is like a pizza gateway drug. If you're going to use cilantro — which becomes fiercely bitter and grassy when exposed to the baking heat of a pizza oven and, if put on after baking, simply wilts into a tired, sad little sprig — why stop there? Why not candy corn? Why not melted crayons? There has to be a line drawn somewhere, and for me that line comes long before you start reaching for the cilantro.

My most frightening early experience at Sazza was a night when I stopped in for three or four personal pizzas (a simple four-cheese, probably that one with duck on it, a couple others) and found myself most enjoying the one that tasted like a hot Fig Newton with burnt rosemary needles. It wasn't that I particularly liked the Fig Newton pizza, but that everything else was so much worse.

Still, something about Sazza kept drawing me back. I might be stuck in my own pizza preferences, but I am also respectful (and occasionally envious) of those who are trying to do new things — and Jenni and Jeff were definitely trying. Every time I returned to their small, spare, brightly lit and très moderne, fast-casual-looking pizza joint, I saw that the menu had been changed, tightened. I saw the place when it was furiously busy — all the low, blond, recycled-wood tables and the high counter seats by the window taken by neighbors and families, the register backed up with people getting takeout. I also saw it when it was miserably quiet — just me, a green-chile enchilada pizza with cilantro, a glass of biodynamic wine and Jeff behind the counter, staring forlornly out through the glass. I saw that Jenni and Jeff were cudgeling their dream into a slow-growing maturity that was being dearly purchased, month by month, lesson by lesson.

Once the kitchen got its legs, for example, the crusts were fine — a perfect thickness, a perfect blend of stiff, stone-charred bottom to soft, yielding top. In particular, they were good on the eight-inch personal pizzas, which is tough to pull off because those things burn in half a second if not watched very carefully by someone who knows just when to pull them. Additionally, Sazza kept working until it got the four-cheese mix right. Its blend has mozzarella and provolone as well as romano and parmesan — generally a sin of damning proportion, because those last two cheeses often come together to taste and smell like a foot. But the kitchen uses fresh, real romano and parmesan, not the crap in the little cans, so that rather than add a footy flavor, they merely lend a sting of saltiness and sourness balanced by the mozzarella and provolone. On other pies, the kitchen uses gruyère — an underappreciated pizza cheese (like emmenthaler) that works well as long as it's paired with an equal or greater amount of mozzarella.

Over the months, I watched Sazza pull other things together. The first time I'd had the French onion pizza, it was terrible. Yes, there was gruyère, but it was smothered with caramelized onions that were barely browned, bitter with the flavor of scorched garlic. A few weeks later, though, the same pizza was excellent — a smart and controlled transposition of flavors from the soup crock to the pie, lightly touched with garlic oil, spread thinly with shaved and properly caramelized onions that'd settled gently into their bed of milky, soft cheese. And all of a sudden, I no longer needed several beers and a side of chicken wings just to be in the same room with a barbecued-chicken pizza dotted with chunks of pineapple. At Sazza, I even kind of liked it — though I justified that by determining that the inclusion of slivered red onion and a light touch of barbecue sauce balanced the slick, wet sweetness of the fruit and made the combination work.

There are still problems: The basil pesto on the white pizza remains inedibly bad (too strong, too punch-in-the-face forward and used in too great a quantity to be balanced by a simple slice of tomato and a jacket of mild cheese); the pepperoni used by the kitchen tastes like fried baloney (not a bad thing, necessarily, but not something I want on my pizza); and I still want to cry a little for my lost youth when I see a menu listing garlic-shot cheeseburger pizza with ketchup and lettuce. But while Sazza is not yet a great pizza joint, it's fought its way through all my prejudices to become a solidly good one.