Nella Grassano ruined pizza for Chicago. Or at least she ruined the notion that even bad pizza is good pizza. That was in early 2006, when she first enchanted us at Spacca Napoli as the taciturn pizzaiola who emigrated from the Boot along with a 13,000-pound volcanic-stone oven.
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I was reminded of that in the middle of writing this review when I found myself checking out Big Bricks, the second outlet from the owners of Lincoln Park’s 15-year-old Bricks. Stylistically, comparing a Bricks (or Big Bricks) pizza to a Grassano is like holding up a pigeon against a swan. But there was a time when I would unquestioningly scarf down BB’s stiff, inharmonious, overloaded pies and happily demolish the leftovers for breakfast.
It’s difficult to believe it’s only been six and a half years since Grassano leveled this landscape. Since then, Neapolitan-style pies are a dime a dozen, along with a proliferation of non-Italian regional varieties about town such as the Quad Cities-style at Roots and the New Haven-style at Coalfire. And arguably, she paved the way for the uncompromisingly artisanal Great Lake, where partisans are willing to wait hours longer for a pie than it took to obtain one of Nella’s.
All of this is accomplished in an environment that smacks a bit of the cornballing inherent to many of Scott Harris’s restaurants: paper place mats offering a glossary of Italian hand gestures, photographs of Vespas on cobbled streets, and some of what appear to be the very shots of Grassano and her children throwing flour at each other that hung in the last place (was Harris cropped out?).
1443 W. Fullerton
773-281-6600
pizzeriadanella.com
