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Dining review: Pizzaiolo Bavaro is the upper crust of pizzerias

Tribune photo by CLIFF McBRIDE

Smoky salami gives the Carne pizza a powerful punch at Pizzaiolo Bavaro in downtown Tampa. It's served with salad and bruschetta.

By RICHARD MULLINS | The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 30, 2009

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TAMPA - Artisan pizza maker Dan Bavaro gently scoots a paper-thin pie into a massive, round stone oven with a swift "shwick!"

The dough instantly begins to swell in the 900-degree heat and small chunks of mozzarella melt delicately into the tomato sauce. In just 90 seconds, he pulls out a steaming gourmet creation.

Watching him at work, with Sinatra crooning in the background and tea light candles blinking in niches of the brick walls, you might imagine yourself in a street-side Italian trattoria. This, however, is on Franklin Street in downtown Tampa, inside the fantastic new pizza-oven restaurant, Pizzaiolo Bavaro.

Before you stumble over the name, here's how to pronounce it: "PEATS-eye-OH-loh. Bah-VAH-roh." (The Italian term for pizza chef and the founder's last name.) It helps to act like a character from "The Godfather" and kiss your fingertips in reverence.

Open since March, the restaurant represents a fantastic addition to Tampa for those who love authentic Neapolitan-style, thin crust pizza.

This isn't to say you couldn't already get good pizza around town, but Pizzaiolo Bavaro takes the craft to a new level of fanatical devotion. Bavaro had the 5,000-pound oven built as a whole piece in Naples (construction took a month), shipped directly to Franklin Street, and rolled in by a monster-sized forklift. Each morning, chefs restart a wood fire in the oven at 7 a.m. to make the day's bread and prepare the oven for pizza.

Bavaro trained and researched for two years to refine the concept. He uses a dough recipe that dates back five generations, with imported Italian flour, sea salt and wild yeast.

I recommend parking yourself on a stool at the high counter with a view of the oven to watch the pizza-maker at work. If you bring kids, they're invariably fascinated with the action.

To start, we had the classic Caprese salad, with rich plum tomatoes and fresh mozzarella di bufala the restaurant imports from Italy regularly, and which tastes wonderfully handmade: a bit more rustic than you might be used to from grocery-store fresh mozzarella.

We tried three pizzas, each about 12 inches in diameter, on a crisp-yet-chewy, handmade dough.

The first was a veggie, which was hands down the best we've ever had anywhere. The veggies were seasoned first to give them a bit more punch, and brief oven roasting softened the chunks of eggplant, zucchini and peppers, bringing out their flavor without reducing them to mush.

The second was the Carne, with a traditional tomato sauce, chunks of mozzarella, and paper-thin slices of soppressata, a dry-cured salami. Unlike an American-style pepperoni pizza covered in cheese and ingredients, this version drops a sprinkling of cheese and salami on the pizza. The point here is the quality of the ingredients, not the quantity. One bite might have just cheese and sauce, the next a layer of smoky salami with a powerful punch.

Our third pie was a hybrid we requested, with salami and mushroom. Again, ingredients were scattered on the dough, rather than drowning it.

There's no official kids menu. To feed a kid in our group, we asked for a basic cheese pizza, which came similarly dappled with toppings. Wonderful, but not the kind of cheese pizza the kids might expect from Domino's.

"Now, so much pizza is produced commercially," said Bavaro, whose family has been in the restaurant business for generations. "I felt called to do something in a more artisan way."

For dessert, we tried the Nutella pizza. That's right: Nutella. The pizza-maker starts with a square of dough that puffs up like a pillow in the oven, then slices the pillow horizontally into two thin sheets. While it's still hot, he spreads aromatic Nutella chocolate sauce on the dough, and closes it back up to melt. With a dusting of powdered sugar and sliced into wedges, it becomes something like a dessert crepe, but with more chew and crunch, and it's just heavenly. I'd recommend it for any wine-and-dessert date night.

Other desserts include an authentic Italian treat: an oven-toasted waffle with hand-made gelato.

It's worth knowing that for lunch, the restaurant makes wonderful calzones for smaller meals. Later this year, Pizzaiolo Bavaro will add more Italian items, including lasagna and other pastas.

Sure, there may be times you just want a $5 pizza from a chain. But there are also times for an authentic Italian pizza that transports you across the ocean.