Have you tried a pizza cocktail?

By Erin Lyall, LA Weekly

Trattoria Neapolis  — an airy, bustling Italian bistro in Pasadena — is a passion project for owner Perry Vidalakis, who did his research and takes his pizza very seriously. Authenticity is so paramount, he had a 7,000-pound wood-burning oven shipped over from Naples (the floor had to be reinforced to hold its weight), he built a humidity- and temperature-controlled room for his pizza dough, and he hired an Italian pizzaiolo to churn out the wood-fired pies.

The Pizza Cocktail. Photo by Chris Jolly

This October (Pizza Nonth, as if you needed an excuse) you can celebrate with one of the chewy pies from that fancy oven — and pair it with the Pizza Cocktail, a scarily accurate drink that tastes as if your slice jumped into a Vitamix with a bottle of vodka. Tomato water, basil-infused vodka, ghost pepper–infused vodka, porcini powder and muddled basil are shaken together and topped with a Parmesan and mozzarella foam. No kidding.

There are any number of great pies around town but in this super-hot oven they’re cooked in less than 90 seconds. When to turn the pizza, how to move it into different parts of the oven, how thin to stretch the dough — that’s hard to learn. We sat down with pizzaiolo Michele Galifi, who mans the oven without breaking a sweat. He’s a guy with secrets: He won’t share his age, the mix of flours he uses in his dough, the temperature he chills it to or the special cheese topping with which he dusts his pies at the end. But that’s what makes them special.

Read the full article by Erin Lyall from LA Weekly.