REVIEW: Top-notch ingredients, service propel pizzeria to great heights

When retired Air Force Col. Dave Brackett decided to open a restaurant serving artisan, wood-fired pizzas, he took on the mission with the same skill and precision he used for years flying F-16s as a fighter pilot.

No detail was left to chance. The lifelong amateur chef studied the art of traditional pizzamaking through the Italian Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. He learned to mix and stretch his dough by hand. He started making his own mozzarella from scratch. He was taught to navigate the sometimes hostile terrain of tending an 800-degree brick wood-fired oven.

And when Pizzeria Rustica opened in May, it was right on target.

I mean it. Every aspect of this restaurant is the bomb. Each thin, 12-inch pizza shoveled out of the glowing, pecan-wood oven is a masterpiece of high-end Italian flour and lovingly local toppings. The service is smart and precise. Diners laze in a timeless alleyway patio slaked in leafy shade by day and the twinkle of little lights by night.

I know I'll get bombarded for giving a pizza place five stars when I've never given that rating to the fanciest fine-dining restaurants in the area, but for what it tries to be, this place is tops. Pizzeria Rustica is not just the best pizzeria of its kind in the region, it's the best I've been to anywhere.

It's surprising since the place was such a bad idea. Few people who love to cook and dream of opening a restaurant actually should. The grind of cranking out orders soon wears most of the love off cooking. Most of the business is really about business - advertising, balancing books, etc. - and most little hobby eateries just rack up debt before finally closing. As the saying goes, "If you want to make a small fortune in the restaurant business, start with a large one."

Leave it to a fighter pilot to know the danger going in and do it anyway.

Rustica is superbly simple. There is no pasta, no burger, no chicken. There is just an antipasto plate, three sparse salads and eight pizzas. One could spend a lifetime appreciating these small things.

The antipasto ($6) is unmatched by any in town. The centerpiece swings between seafood and cured meat. I landed there on a seafood day to be enraptured by a tumble of springy squid rings, chewy octopus and sweet scallops in a tart lemon zest dressing. It is escorted by real Old World olives, sour caper berries and a mild, creamy asiago cheese that Brackett, who seems to always be patrolling the dining room touting the ingredients, said owed its mellowness to being "medium aged."

"A midlife crisis," a dining partner leaned over and said, "but a delicious one."

The pizzas are the only thing that could outgun a starter of that caliber.

Each plate-size pie ($10-$13) has a chewy, airy crust, singed, bubbled and slightly burned by the intense oven until it has a crackly veneer. The thin smear of sauce has the unmistakable bright ruby glow of fresh-diced tomatoes. You can spot them from 5 feet away.

The cheese has a sweet, almost floral, fresh-milk flavor. You can taste that it was made by hand, that day, just a few steps away.

The combined powers of the pizza brought all conversation at my table of three to a halt. Then, after a minute of chewing, with mouths still very full, here's what was said.

"Oh, the cheese!"

"This crust!"

"No, this sauce!"

The simple pizzas are deceptively complex. Take the salami pizza. It's just salami and cheese, but that salami is Tuscan finocchiona - a spicy, fennel-infused variety bursting with a slow, air-cured flavor that approaches the best prosciutto.

The sausage pizza is just sausage, but the sweet, local pork, paired with the amazing homemade mozzarella, has a beguiling blend of flavors I usually find only in a bottle of wine I can't afford.

Even the plain cheese arrives on an artisan pedestal. It's four cheeses: mozzarella, sharp provolone, fontina and some of that midlife asiago. The whole bubbling mass is sprinkled with fresh parsley and heavenly wood-roasted garlic.

At the end, Rustica offers truffle oil for crust dipping.

Dessert is small and simple, but should not be missed. Tiny scoops of spumoni gelato piled in a bowl ($5), loaded with the blended flavors of pistachio, chocolate and vanilla bean with a hint of dried cherries, soars above the typical sugar slurry you get at Italian places.

"Did you like it?" Brackett said on his third sortie past our table. "I put a little blood orange balsamic syrup on there that's just awesome."

On another night, Brackett came to the table talking up his special tiramisu. Normally, tiramisu is a dessert that restaurants hack from a frozen loaf made far away. Not here. Rustica's arrived as a cloud of fresh, real whipped cream hiding homemade ladyfingers drenched in booze - deadly delicious.

Rustica isn't cheap - with dessert and antipasto, look to pay $25 a person - but it is absolutely worth it. As one friend said, "This isn't family-night pizza, it's date night pizza." One way to save money is to curb curiosity over the $9-a-bottle Italian microbrew. It's nothing special.

Not surprisingly, the place is packed on weekends. If Brackett set out to make a restaurant that would become a long-lived favorite, then mission accomplished.

details
PIZZERIA RUSTICA
••••• (As good as it gets)

Address: 2527 W. Colorado Ave.
Contact: 632-8121; pizzeriarustica.com
Entrees: $10-$13
Hours: Dinner 5-9 p.m. daily; reservations recommended
Vegetarian: Several pizzas
Liquor: Beer and wine
Plastic: Yes