REMEMBER when pizza was easy? Before Puck or Paradiso, before brick ovens and wood-burning stoves, before goat cheese or Thai chicken, before whole wheat or semolina or gluten-free doughs -- back when pepperoni lay on the cheese in puddles of grease and "through thick or thin" referred to your best friend, not the crust? What about those stainless-steel salad bars and the industrial-weight wine glasses (and the "carafes" that looked like FTD vases) and the baskets of garlic bread?
Pizza is big business these days, in every sense of the phrase. (Whatever you think of the supersizing issue, it's hard to watch all those advertisements for cheese-stuffed or doubled crusts, or ones with extra tear-off dough around the edges, or even free bags of fried dough balls -- and their ecstatic compulsive consumption by the "ideal" TV family -- and not wonder just what "domestic terrorism" really means.) There's no question that, in general, pizza tastes better than it did back in the days when it was hard to tell the crust from the cardboard box, and it's almost all a lot more like the Italian original than it used to be.
Pizza is a main dish at Zio's Italian Restaurant in Gaithersburg.
(Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)
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But every once in a while, a simply good pizza at an old-fashioned family pizza house is just what you need. And for a quarter of a century, Zio's Italian Restaurant in Gaithersburg has been producing one of the best pizzas in the area out of a plain, old-fashioned electric oven. Because no matter how fancy the brickwork or how seasoned the wood, when it comes down to the flavor, it's the dough, stupid.
Zio's is pizza for those who thought that Stouffer's French bread pizzas were, well, on to something but not quite there. Zio's dough tastes like bread. Real bread. Bread you would eat for pleasure. Even the cut-the-crust-off types are likely to eat their way through these slices. If the restaurant sold uncooked dough by itself, it would make killer bread sticks. It's thinnish, but not flabby, coming to the table cooked through but not dry -- and though for years the oven was just slightly off-balance, like a home stove, and one half of the pie would be crunchier, and the other side saucier, it's long since settled into even-handedness.
And even better, it's Mama's recipe, "Mama" being Rosalina Pappano, the mother of co-owners Anthony and Vito Pappano, who brought that and many of the restaurant's other recipes with her when she left southern Italy back in the '20s. Anthony Pappano and his (the District's defunct St. Anthony's) high school buddy John Beard started out by catering big Italian festivals, using that same dough, and opened Zio's back in 1978. (Ironically, there is a chain of Zio's Brick Oven restaurants, but there's no connection.)
The menu lists a couple of dozen toppings, none much more eclectic than pineapple; and the housemade tomato sauce is first-rate. There is a mini-pizza, a seven-incher, along with the usual small, medium and large. But other than that, it hasn't changed much in all those years. And the number of multi-generational parties that eat there regularly is its own sort of tribute.
Zio's is a pleasant room -- it used to be divided into smoking and nonsmoking by the salad bar, but Montgomery County's no-smoking law solved that -- a soothing green with slick but amusing posters and a black-and-white check motif and vines stenciled around the ceiling. The salad dressings are better than most, and the selection fairly generous. There is (ordinary) plain bread on the salad bar, that infamous garlic bread by order and even, you should blush to remember, fried mozzarella sticks.
But doing one thing really well is a particular virtue, and the pizza mostly puts the non-pizza fare in the shade (though it's really big with kids). The kitchen has a habit -- itself so old-fashioned it's almost endearing -- of not draining linguini long enough so that there's water in the bottom of the plate. The dishes can occasionally seem bland: The eggplant is fried not only in the parmigiana but for the rigatoni Siciliana, and so is the calamari in its only pasta version, which takes the edge off the otherwise pleasant marinara. Cream sauces are sometimes, though not always, over heavy. (Cream sauces wouldn't be a southern Italian specialty, anyway.)
Chicken is more likely to survive its sauteing than the less tender veal (which is also breaded), and while the regular lasagna is pretty good, the vegetarian version, with broccoli, carrots, zucchini and onions, doesn't quite jell. Better bets include the cannelloni, which is stuffed with a very nice veal-chicken-spinach mousse; the spinach involtini; the after-yardwork-hearty sausages and peppers, which can be ordered over bread as well as over pasta; and another oddly '50s sort of Cal-Ital dish called steak pizzaiola, which has chunks of oil-and-vinegar-marinated steak in the marinara sauce. And the calzone, of course, which is just the original thick-crust pizza.
Here's the bottom line: These days, moderately priced and consistent pasta is fairly easy to find. But pizza you could pick out of a lineup? That's worth the dough.
Zio's does a pretty brisk carryout business, and you can order an uncooked pizza made up with all the toppings and then cook it yourself at home.
