Dining
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Greensboro pizza place very close to heaven
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Published: July 17, 2008
GREENSBORO - Nobody likes a beggar.
But I'm going to be one.
Neil Reitzel, are you reading this? Please, please, please open a pizzeria in Winston-Salem. Or someone else willing to risk investing in tomatoes and fresh mozzarella -- go to Reitzel's Greensboro restaurant, Sticks and Stones, and take copious notes. Perhaps spend some time in New York and New Haven on fact-finding missions. Italy is a mandatory stop, of course, but really, that's just for educational purposes.
That's because Sticks and Stones doesn't make any silly claims about its pies that it can't possibly live up to. "New York-style," or "taste of the Old Country." Its pizzas are charred, chewy, crispy and, above all, delicious and utterly comfortable in their own skins.
This is a restaurant that serves pies evocative of their place -- a smart, small menu of locally sourced salads, cured meats and olives, bruschetta with ricotta, roasted peppers and sweet sausage, and the real gem, Neapolitan-style pizza with a fire-streaked char. The sausage and the beef are from Cane Creek Farm in Alamance County, the goat cheese is from Goat Lady Dairy, and charcuterie are from Giacomo's, the much-lauded-by-foodies Italian deli that's just across Greensboro.
At the same time, you can get a slice, a drink and a salad or soup for lunch here for under $6.
Ah, and the pizza. There is pizza with country ham and pistachios. There is pizza with chicken, gorgonzola and sauteed fennel, and pizzas with pine nuts and sopressata. Yeah, there's even a little trendy truffle oil. These aren't toppings for glory and excess. They are used with restraint. They all work together.
Not that every pie is perfect. Sometimes they could benefit from a few more minutes in the 700-degree-or-so wood oven. But the crust has delicacy and heft at the same time, some bites crunchy, others chewy and yielding.
Perhaps my favorite was the Easy Plateau pie, a glorious mess of fingerling potatoes, ground beef, goat cheese and Swiss chard shredded and cooked down so much it looks and tastes like earthy basil. Or maybe it was A Kiss Before I Go, sort of a pizza crossed with eggplant parmesan, with crackly fried pieces of eggplant balanced on a bed of richly-flavored tomato sauce, mushrooms and carmelized garlic. Then again, I loved the sultry Firecracker, with anchovies, chiles and bacon, and I thought the classic Margarita was fair.
I've had mixed experiences with salads, though. It's noble of Sticks and Stones to use local tomatoes, but they need to taste good, too (they were pale and watery). Sometimes the salads are well-dressed, with goat cheese and roasted, red-peppery dressing, and sometimes they are just plopped on a plate, under-salted and with too much dressing or worse, not enough. Praise be, there are shards of real Parmesan on the Caesar salad. But it's canceled out by an anchovy-rich dressing that doesn't begin to cover the romaine. Parmesan and lettuce do not a salad make.
But those are blips. Meals are amazing here -- not just because of the pizza, but because of the antipasti, too. Fried rounds of mozzarella are like a kicked-in-the-butt version of fried mozzarella sticks, drizzled with pesto and nestled next to roasted tomatoes. The mozzarella is house-made, and the ricotta on the bruschetta tastes like it should be. French fries have also grown up -- impossibly thin, hot, crisp, scattered with salt and rosemary.
An old service station strung up with small chandeliers and Edwardian-looking light fixtures, this is a restaurant that oozes recycled chic. The bar stools are gnarled re-bar and polished wood. A long communal table is fashioned from benches and a solid piece of black walnut. If you're seated there with a small group, you could up end sharing it. I love that, even if you risk your neighbor's spilled beer creeps onto your side of the table. The waiters are quick with rags.
You may actually want dessert here, and that's good, because there's a simple but killer peach walnut cobbler, baked in the same oven as the pizzas. Another night, we had a bowl of vivid-tasting blueberry ice cream from Homeland Creamery.
Reitzel opened the Blind Tiger, a live-music venue, in 1988 with a friend (Reitzel has since gotten out). He went into the restaurant business in 2001 when he opened seafood-heavy Fishbones next door. He opened Sticks and Stones in April across the street. Today his life is spent running between the two.
The two restaurants are in Lindley Park, a Greensboro neighborhood near UNCG that's like a modest Ardmore, with a more eclectic heart of funky bars, a grocery store, and a Laundromat.
Did Reitzel arrange for an evening thunderstorm on a recent Tuesday? Rain rattled the long windows, a pair of little girls danced in the lobby by a fish tank, and a waitress turned down the lights.
Cozy doesn't begin to describe it.
It could get precious. It doesn't.
That's perhaps Sticks and Stones' greatest feat of all.
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com
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