Pizza-wise, maybe you just had to be (born) there

I told her Jeff's story. He was a man I had gotten to know while writing a profile of him for the paper. A New Yorker by birth and software engineer by training, he had turned his attention — obsessively — to making pizza at home.

It took him years, but he developed a miraculous sourdough crust that stretched to transparent thinness in the center and yet swelled with air bubbles at the edges like a self-inflating raft. He turned the standard-issue electric range in his Buckhead townhome into a whirring, glowing, tin-foil-wrapped, blazing-hot contraption that looked like it was jerry-rigged by E.T. himself.

Varasano, 42, made fantastic pizza — crisp, thin, gorgeous with bubbles and char — for the lucky folks who were able to scare an invitation to one of the semi-underground pizza parties at his house. Soon, he would open his own pizza restaurant.

"Why don't we wait for that?" my impatient kid asked, as we slogged up I-75.

"Because Jeff told me he liked this place, he's very picky about pizza, and he's going to join us for dinner."

What was so great about this pizza? I had no idea: Jeff Varasano isn't prone to flowery description.

"It's, I don't know, pretty good New York style," was all he would say.

LaBella's Pizzeria occupied a neon-bright hunk of strip mall. A takeout counter fronted the length of its small space, and a few mismatched tables crowded in front. On the wall: one of those curiously flat murals of a sad-looking pizzaiolo holding a peel in front of a brick oven. The New Yorkers responsible for LaBella's are the father and son, Rick and Stephen Sorrentino, who decamped from Long Island to Marietta 16 years ago. The burly Sorrentinos stood behind the counter, Stephen wearing a Gold's Gym T-shirt coated in a patina of flour.

My child and I grabbed a table and waited for Jeff, who was running late. The only other customers were an older couple who devoured a pizza in companionable silence, and a family of five who seemed to be recent transplants, judging from the kids' still-strong Northeastern accents. The oldest daughter was telling unprintable stories about the girls in her high school. "Oh my gawd, do their parents know?" asked the mom over and over, her droopy slice aloft. I tried to distract my eavesdropping daughter with a cellphone game.

Another couple arrived to pick up a carry-out order, and the woman sidled up to me to offer some sotto voce advice out of earshot from the Sorrentinos.

"The trick is to pick it up a half hour late," she said, "because they put the box on top of the oven, and it gets the crust nice and crisp!"

Jeff arrived with Heather Stokley, his friend and frequent companion who handles publicity for the new restaurant, to be called Varasano's.

We ordered a plain cheese pie because Jeff said that was the only way to judge a pizza's merit.

As we drank Cokes from Styrofoam cups and waited for our order, Jeff told my enraptured kid a thorough history of pizza, starting with the flatbreads of antiquity. By the time Queen Margherita of Savoy was presented with the pizza that would bear her name, we heard a "Yo! Cheese pizza's ready!"

We let it rest until we could wait no longer and dug in. It was ... good. Very good. Tasty, with a crust that was admirably thin if a little flaccid. But worth an hour and a half in the car? I don't know; I'm no New Yorker.

But Jeff was in snarf rapture, devouring his folded slice — hunched over and positioning his mouth so it could sort of fall in.

"So, what makes this pizza so great?" I asked.

"I dunno," he said, "It was better last time."

"What makes it good?" I persisted as Jeff took a second slice and assumed docking position.

"You can taste the cheese," he offered, adding, "It's a New York style." Hmm.

When we got up to leave, Jeff questioned Stephen Sorrentino about the zeppoles on the menu — fresh doughnuts only available on Sunday.

"You know what zeppoles are?" Sorrentino asked, surprised.

"Do I know what zeppoles are? I'm from the Bronx," Jeff answered.

All ears in the room perked up, and for a second there I think I got it: "New York style" is as much about the pizzeria as the pizza.

LaBella's Pizzeria, 2635 Sandy Plains Road, Marietta. 770-973-0052.