FIRST BITE
The bar was beautiful, but also nearly empty, Lindsey Corbin thought. ●S●★ and her friend were sipping on cocktails. As Corbin glanced around the dimly lit lounge — decorated with exposed light bulbs, gold-trimmed mirrors and leather seats — she envisioned holding her company’s holiday party there. ● On September 27, 2018, Corbin and a girlfriend had just finished watching a Ballet Arizona performance in downtown Phoenix. They were walking to their car when a man implored them: Come up to M.O.B. Social Club, a recently opened members-only bar. “The way they had constructed it, it looked very high-end,” Corbin describes to The Arizona Republic, more than a year after that first visit. “Comfortable seating. Nothing about it on the inside was sketch. It looked like a premium-type place.”
Pane Bianco Van Buren is open again ... again.
In person, Chris Bianco is a ball of restless energy — always tweaking, always fiddling, always trying to tie a wild collection of thoughts together into a cohesive vision that will speak to the dining public.
Sometimes those internal processes play out in real time.
What started as a quest to rescue a historic building and bring good, affordable cuisine to a neighborhood that could use a nice spot has turned into a bit of a revolving door. In a little over a year and a half, Bianco has launched a restaurant in the old Roland’s Market building on Van Buren three times. First it was Roland’s, his collaboration with Nadia Holguin and Armando Hernandez of Tacos Chiwas that brought three squares a day in Mex-Italian style. Next came an offshoot of the original Pane Bianco on Central, quickly cloned and plugged in to fill the void left by Roland’s when it abruptly shuttered just ten months into its run.
January 2020 marks the third coming of Bianco’s Van Buren project — still Pane Bianco, but a more fleshed-out and distinct version with a little East Coast Italian-American sass.
Here’s hoping this one sticks, it’s good.
New menu leans old-school Italian-American
Part
● of the original Pane because
Bianco’s
charm is that it’s a chameleon, always changing to meet the dining public’s interests and Chris and Marco Bianco’s needs of the moment. But the core ethos — simple sandwiches built on stellar local ingredients and fresh-baked Old World-style bread with depth and character — has anchored every incarnation of Pane Bianco. The new Pane Bianco Van Buren is no exception.
What’s new this time around is that Bianco is letting a little bit more of that meaty, red-saucy New World sneak into the frame.
A short list of pizzette, for example, includes a devastating lemon pie, a diminutive serving of blistered bread touched with rosemary and slivered onion, topped with the bracing sour pop of shaved whole lemon. It’s like a riff on his signature pizza rosa, except in place of the pistachios you’ll find an explosive blast of Arizona citrus sunshine.
At the same time, however, the menu includes a Sicilian slice — a thick, doughy chunk of pizza saturated with tomatoes and olive oil that’s a dead ringer for old-school East Coast Italian deli pizza.
Don’t skip the pasta e fagioli
With all due respect to the Tuscan original, Bianco’s pasta e fagioli could beat its inspiration to a creamy pulp in a bar brawl.
It’s like a bowl of pasta e fagioli that hooked up with a personal trainer — chonkified and dragged through the Southwest, brimming with a blend of cannellini, tepary and pinto beans. Rather than a small pasta like ditalini or pipette, Bianco fills the bowl with heavy-duty rigatoni corti, then spices it up with a searing shot of Sonoran chiltepin.
Not everything course.
There’s a lengthy list of salads, including an excellent chicken salad that’s almost a three-for-one. Nestled into a bed of crisp greens is a rustic, creamy chicken salad, perfectly seasoned and studded with big chunks of apple and celery. But the accompanying fingerling potatoes — saturated in a vinegary sweet dressing that penetrates deep into their core — almost steal the show. is so muscular,
What’s a ‘pizza burger’?
of
Regulars of the original Pane Bianco
Pane Bianco Van Buren
1505 E. Van Buren St., Phoenix. 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.
Slices and pizzette $5-$9.50; soups $6-$9; salads $6-$13; sandwiches $9-$14.
602-441-4749, pizzeriabianco.com.
will recognize standards like mozzarella, soppressata and prosciutto panini. But in addition to the more delicate standbys, there are some bruisers in this bunch.
Francesca’s meatball sandwich might be the best in town, and it makes the jump from Pizzeria Bianco Town & Country — giant, tender meatballs on muscular country bread with an intense, crackling crunch.
Bracketing the meatball sub are a pair of sandwiches built around chicken cutlets, tender breast pounded thin, coated with crush breadcrumbs and pan-fried to a golden crisp. One goes light, adding a pile of crisp, fresh vegetables and a swipe of rich aioli, while the other is smothered in a thick, longcooked tomato sauce and covered with shaved Parmesan.
The Italian combo is a beast with a crusty carapace wrapped around a layered wall of meat — soppressata, coppa and mortadella stratified like an archaeological dig, anointed by an oreganoflecked giardiniera with crunch and vinegar and spice.
And hey, there’s a burger, though it almost doesn’t play like one. Bianco conceived the “pizza burger” as a kind of breadcrumb-less meatball, smashed and sizzled and slid into tender focaccia with a douse of marinara.
Pane Bianco Van Buren is a lunch affair for now, but Bianco plans to add evenings and weekend brunch as the newest version finds its footing. With Bianco, is seems nothing is ever really “done.”
It’s part of the charm.