No Words

Not from me, at any rate.  Not yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBLI9jq6tUY

Bonci Pizzarium, or I Take Back What I Said About Roman Street Pizza

I want to give credit to the illustrator that made these drawings for the business owner I'm profiling here.  I just can't seem to figure out who they are.  In no way do I claim authorship...but I do claim admiration for them! 💗
Also, for the record, I attempted to translate 'sblindi,' and got nowhere. Maybe it means 'ta-dah!'? 'Panificazione,' on the other hand, is 'bread-making.'  

I have to eat a few words in this post, but if they came on magic Bonci Pizzarium pizza, I wouldn't hesitate. 

While I would love a print subscription to Lucky Peach ('Dear Santa...') I am happy to report that they regularly appear in my social media news feed with articles and interviews, and this will have to do for now. 

And Lucky Peach is probably how I learned about this Roman pizza joint. 

I've already extolled the virtues of the hand-tossed thin-crust pizzas made and sold in a vast variety of places here. 

And I also said some unkind things about Roman street pizza, what some call taglia (soft) pizza, baked in rectangular shapes, cut with scissors and generally ho-hum - if not downright lame - in flavor and structure.  In many cases, the stuff is sub-par to begin with, and then it sits in a case all day, awaiting a little re-heating in a forno.

Many of those unkind things are still true.

But Bonci Pizzarium kicks all of those things in the teeth, too. 

Near a Metro stop in an unremarkable neighborhood (unless you count its decent proximity to the Vatican), in a tiny, walk-in place that only hosts stand-up dining, you find the absolute best version of taglia pizza.  Any good Italian chef knows that if you approach the breadmaking with seriousness, and you then allow good ingredients to sit center-stage, you win.
And Gabriele Bonci does all of these things with aplomb.

He also understands partnerships. Remember my 'cheating' blog entry of several weeks ago, in which I waxed rhapsodic about a beer and burger place, and sung the praises of the buns?  Those are Bonci buns.

Bonci knows bread.

And in Bonci Pizzarium's coolers are Open Baladin (that beer and burger place) sodas and beers.
Relationships matter, here.

It has recently come to my attention that Bonci has another location for this awesome pizza, and it's at this equally awesome Central Market attached to the back side of Roma Termini Station.  I've visited this location as well, and here's what I have learned:  Bonci must also know a thing or two about customer service.
Because Roman service can often be indifferent, at best, and surly, at worst.  But Bonci people are genuinely nice. And in a big city with a lot of hungry people who want your pizza and they want it now...it's pretty nice to be treated nicely. It matters. 

I can't decide if I should buy into the hype and try Bonci's flours.  This is one of those cases where I sense that having an awesome key ingredient is actually only a tiny fragment of the magic. Put more simply:  I probably need better skills.

I'm not sure, but I sense that the back of the house - where all the action is - is only slightly larger than the front.

So many flavors to choose from.

So what'd you get? you'd probably ask.

I went slightly old school with roasted cherry tomatoes and cheese on one set of slices, and I also went a little rogue with the second set, involving a layer of hummus topped with mortadella, a type of Bolognese salumi with thin chunks of pork fat. Someone asked me recently if it was like standard bologna - the kind we all had on white sandwich bread slathered with mayo, when we were kids, the kind that sometimes came with a little strip of red casing that you had to peel off before eating.
And my answer is that mortadella comes from the city of Bologna, and after that, the similarities between it and what we suffered through as kids ends.  Mercifully.

I wondered if I would be non-plussed by the tomato version, and thrown off by the hummus/mortadella version (an odd combo, maybe?). 

And I was totally wrong. 

This day - of my first Bonci visit - was Vatican day with my class, and I'd just finished 3 intensive hours of walking and talking (me on a mic, them with radio headphone equipment) through both the Vatican museums (the Sistine Chapel is but one chunk of the itinerary) and St. Peter's Basilica.  My back hurt.  My feet were killing me. I hadn't been to the bathroom since breakfast. I had to stand and wait for my pizza to finish its reheating, and then I had to stand in chilly, rainy weather and eat it.

And it was fantastic.

What matters here is that Bonci has crafted a simultaneously soft-chewy yet crispy, almost focaccia-like bread for this stuff. The ingredients are supported on a firm foundation that, if you took them all away and left just the bread, would hold its own as a fine, fine bread.

What also matters is that the BEST version of this pizza is one of the simplest (and so good, I bypassed photographing it in favor of stuffing my face with it): cherry tomatoes, lots of chopped basil, and a little bit of dried chili flakes...and can you believe it, no cheese.  It didn't need any.

So the other Bonci lesson is to let your ingredients do all the talking...unless they sing, because they were born in a place with many of the right conditions (the sun, the rain, the soil, blah blah blah) for them to be fantastic to begin with.

And then you let them SING.

This place is so good that I talked the visiting fam into joining me for that pizza.  Standing up in the chilly weather of December. Didn't matter. WORTH IT.

For me, the big picture takeaway is the fact that six months in, Rome feels like a mostly surmountable iceberg (and its even gotten cold like one, lately).  It's huge.  And it continues to surprise.  Discoverability - even on a minor level like pizza - has merit.   And so does the fact that someone elected to improve mightily on an otherwise humble thing that no one else cares that much about.  It's reassuring to find some integrity here and there.