Pie Fidelity
Vaunted chef Neal Brown returns with a funky Carmel pizzeria baking up pies just like in old Napoli.
By Terry Kirts
Like many European travelers, I experienced my pizza epiphany in the ’80s in Florence, Italy, where, at an unassuming streetside bakery, a woman who could barely reach the counter carved a giant square out of the flattest pizza I had ever seen and tossed it into a shallow, smoking oven. The place didn’t even have chairs. But every crispy, chewy bite of that cracker-thin pizza revealed its masterful balance of yeasty, slow-risen dough; not-too-salty prosciutto; and tangy, slightly grassy mozzarella. To this Midwesterner raised on gooey, puffy slices, it was a revelation: It didn’t even have sauce!
You couldn’t get that kind of pizza in the States back then. It would be a decade before a cadre of celebrity chefs, mostly in New York City, would spark a nationwide explosion of artisanal, authenticity-chasing pizzerias. Now, homegrown star Neal Brown has installed his own temple to bona fide Neapolitan pies in Carmel, and while the name Pizzology may not roll off the tongue, his pies are some of the most ambitious ever to slide out of a local pizzeria oven.
Before he spent last summer mastering Americans’ favorite food, Brown had dabbled in sushi at H2O Restaurant & Sushi, gastropub grub at Brugge Brasserie, and hamachi carpaccio at his much-missed L’Explorateur. But is Indianapolis ready for pizza dolled up with roasted figs and littleneck clams?
Apparently, we are: Crowds stretching out the door love the plate-sized, 13-inch pies they can customize with truffle oil, guanciale, and local farmstead eggs. To serve up his slightly scorched, bubbly-crust pies, Brown has largely reassembled his motley crew of articulate hipsters from L’Explorateur as his waitstaff. Efficient and serious, they’re pizza aficionados you can trust.
