Keeping it real in Beijing, one slice of tasty pizza at a time
When it comes to cultural exchanges, including culinary ones, I am firmly in favor of staying true to tradition.
And so, in the name of honoring authenticity, I recently participated in a delightful roundtable discussion in Beijing with three Chinese friends, a meeting that helped advance EastWest cultural relations in a most delicious way.
Our roundtable exchange was actually conducted at a square table, but our discussion focused on something definitely round: a pair of pizzas baked to perfection — and perfectly authentic. That welcome genuineness was why I invited my friends, two of whom had never tasted pizza before, to Casa Gusto, my favorite Beijing pizzeria.
I had stumbled across this deceptively simple pizza house, just upstairs from the Yonganli subway station on Line 1, several months ago during one of my many trips to the multistory (and growing) Silk Street mall — a wonderland of silk, shoes, clothing and jewelry.
I had passed by many times, assuming that the restaurant, which caters to the mall’s many foreign visitors, would, like many pizza places in Beijing, be far from authentic and disappoint in the usual ways (a lack of sauce or flavorless sauce and a dearth of gooey cheese, for starters). How wrong I was.
I finally stopped in for a beer one evening with Western friends. While waiting for our frothy brews, served icecold in skyscraper-size beer glasses on that warm summer evening, we caught a whiff of a pepperoni pizza at a nearby table.
It was, as the late Lou Reed once sang, “the beginning of a great adventure”.
In my many years, I’ve tasted a zillion excellent pies of countless varieties, including the ones my mom made from scratch, slathered with her savory homemade sauce. I’ve visited boisterous pizzerias from Chicago, Illinois, to Itu, Brazil, including the oncepopular Shakey’s Pizza, where banjo players and automated pianos pounded out tunes to enhance the kiddy-centric experience.
Casa Gusto boasts no such gimmicks or gewgaws — no stuffed crust, no arcade games — just wonderfully baked, no-frills pizzas topped with fresh ingredients and friendly service.
Look beyond that, though, and you’ll see the authenticity that is the restaurant’s real secret to success.
The top of each pizza, every time, bears the telltale sign of truly proper baking: Leopardlike spots of brown testify that the bubbly cheese has been toasted just right, which has a profound effect on the texture and flavor of the cheese — perhaps the most crucial ingredient of a proper pizza. There’s more.
The delectable crust is thin but never burned, and crisp yet chewy (no small achievement). The sauce has just the right touch of Italian spices, and the cheese extends to nearly the edge of the pizza, with the selected toppings, ranging from Canadian bacon to jalapeno peppers, spread evenly.
And, a joy to behold, at each table are two containers of grated Parmesan cheese and a shaker of oregano.
The way that the Chinese owners and staff have mastered the art of the excellent pizza shows how fully the pizzeria has embraced the culture of a far-flung land, down to the last detail.
It turns out the authenticity is no accident. When Casa Gusto opened in 2009, its fortunes rested on a pizza oven imported, impressively, from Italy. The sturdy steel behemoth looks nothing like the traditional domed ovens, but it bakes like magic and is highly efficient and dependable: Prepared pizzas are fed one-by-one onto a moving belt, which takes each pie for a seven-minute basking that leaves it toasty gorgeous, redhot and intensely aromatic.
There’s an element of people-to-people exchange as well. For its first year of operation, the pizzeria employed an Italian who made the pizzas according to tradition and trained his Chinese friends to do likewise.
The lessons were obviously taken to heart. No wonder, then, that the pizza at my favorite hangout is more than a slice above the others. It’s a whole pie better.
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