There’s a problem with hype. Too much leads to disappointment. Jeff Varasano, a former software engineer who turned in his geek cap for a pizzaiolo’s oven mitts, has possibly the most talked-about restaurant in Atlanta’s recent history.
His story has become legend but I’ll review briefly: He moved to Atlanta from New York in 1998 and couldn’t find good pizza. So he decided to make his own, using his abilities as an engineer. First, he judged the best pie to be that of Patsy’s in East Harlem, and made that his gold standard. Second, he began experimenting with pizzas and zeppole for guests in his Buckhead home — such a sensation that he was written about in The New York Times and the AJC.
Third, to get his oven to the high heat (around 1,000 degrees) needed to blister the perfect pizza crust, he jury-rigged the heck out of it. He’s stirred up quite a commotion with his Web site, dedicated to his pizza recipe and his list of the best pizza joints in the world, an undertaking more impressive than his restaurant.
Because the next move would be to open your own pizza joint, right? That’s what Varasano did on March 25 in the Mezzo Building on Peachtree Street. He serves a modest menu of pizzas (nine offerings), along with salads, salumi and a few desserts, including zeppole, called Italian doughnuts on the menu.
I have never met Varasano, but he comes across as a bit of a pizza tyrant on his Web site, doling out the information he’s garnered as gospel, and knocking pizzerias the world over (including Fritti, in Inman Park) as “fake.” He gives much praise, too, for the places he likes. I think the one calculation he forgot is that baking for guests in your home is a wee bit different from owning and working in a restaurant. Actually making all that char and blister come out of the oven a few hundred times a night is harder than it looks, and Varasano has never owned a restaurant before now. And for all his talk of oven temperature being one of the three most important factors in pizza making (the other two, he says, are kneading technique and proper fermentation), his oven is not coal-burning. It is electric, though it still fires up beyond 800 degrees. The pizzas bake in about three minutes, not the 90 seconds or so that a coal burner can blaze a perfectly charred crust.
So hype collides with reality, and Varasano’s Pizzeria serves piatti mediocri. There are pies worth the $10 to $15 you’ll spend — the “nucci” is a prettily charred-and-blistered combination of Emmental cheese with olives, arugula, capicola and herbs, and tangy Swiss cheese makes another appearance on a not-too-sweet pizza with caramelized onions.
But often the pizzas are soggy and laden — and worse, inconsistent. A “New Haven clam” pie touts clams, mussels, lots of garlic and either a white or red sauce, at one offering limp and lifeless and at another much more appropriately crisped.
The rest of the menu is as uneven as the pizzas: The zeppole are fun, but nothing sensational.
It ain’t bragging if you can do it, goes the old Babe Ruth quote. Varasano’s Pizzeria has a little more doing to do.
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