Food: Pizzeria Mozza

After all the rage of Mozza from LA food bloggers (Eating L.A., Rate-A-Restaurant, The Knife, Tuna Toast, Chowhound) I figured I HAD to try this place.

This anticipated pizzeria is owned by Mario Batali (From FoodTV), Nancy Silverton and Joe Bastianich. And on Oct. 28, someone broke into the restaurant and walked away with $700 of hand-crafted cured meats made by Batali’s father, Armandino, at his Seattle business, Salumi. Then just two days later, a 13-pound imported Italian mortadella sausage also disappeared. (read the whole LA Times story.) It’s funny though… now on all the bottoms of the reciepts it says…

haha

Photos by chotda

As you would imagine, because of all the food blogs, I had some pretty high expectations for this place. A friend and I caught a movie at the Arc Light (“The Fountain” … very good, go see it) and then afterwards we were hungry so he suggested this new pizza place I had been blabbing about for the past few weeks. We called and got a reservation for 10:00 at 9:45… cool. The place was packed, but a awesome crowd. The tables are packed so tightly that you feel like it’s one big communal table. You hear and see and SMELL everything and everyone around you. And loud it is… so loud it’s hard to even hold a conversation…

We got settled in and after what seemed like a while, our waiter finally came back to take our order. Going in I had a pretty good idea of the things I had to try: fried squash blossoms filled with homemade ricotta, the wine, and the butterscotch budino for desert.

Squash Blossoms

The squash blossoms were great. Perfect in fact. For dinner, I ordered the goat cheese pizza with bacon, and my friend had the fennel sausage. I adore goat cheese but I wasn’t too crazy about my pizza. It was dry with I’m not kidding maybe a tablespoon, maybe, of goat cheese. I could hardly taste or see it! The sausage pizza was great though. I don’t even eat pork usually but I made an exception this night and wow… the depths of favor in the sausage were almost as deep as the wine.

And then for desert…

Butterscotch Budino

That was good too although we were both so full we could hardly finish it.

Overall I really like it. They really do put everything into this pizza. While it may not be the typical American ‘pizza’, it’s their version and it works. It’s wood oven fired goodness. Even though I didn’t care for my pizza too much, it was still good, and I’m sure some of the other pizzas would be much better. The atmosphere is great, the crowd is good and the service is good. There were always waiters around pouring more water and topping off wine glasses. It initially took a while to be waited on but once we did it was fine.

It’s a tid bit pricey… but that’s to be expected in LA. And the ingredients justify the prices. I’ll for sure be back. I want to try everything.

Sorry I didn’t take any of my own pics of my pizza, my camera is horrid in low light. If you want to see some pictures of the pizzas, go check out the other blogs about Mozza above.

Pizzeria Mozza
641 N. Highland Ave.
(323) 297-0101
Open noon-midnight, seven days a week. GET A RESERVATION!

By the way if you want to see the offical press pack and menu in PDF form… Here ya go.