In the dim old days of plain old pizza, the typical slice or pie was made with standard-issue canned tomato sauce topped with melted shreds of equally ordinary mozzarella, a few sprinklings of dried oregano and a touch of olive oil. And it was delicious comfort food that was doggedly good. We didn’t veer off that standard much. Perhaps we added sliced pepperoni, some mushrooms or even sausage or a meatball or two. And that was it. The only other choice was to have it Neapolitan or Sicilian style. In my dim old days, this slice cost about 95 cents (or less). If we went to an Italian restaurant where veal parm or chicken cacciatore were standard fare, another choice was a freshly made pie. Some restaurants did these very well, using their special sauce and cheese and baked in high-heat brick ovens. Nowadays all slices are special especially if you walk into the ubiquitous folds of Otto Pizza, the local chain that populates Greater Portland’s landscape with more stores than Wal-Mart.
The bar and booths at Otto
I give them this: They have mastered the art of the thin-crust pizza. Whether you have it by the slice or sliced from a whole pie you can pick up it up and the slice won’t droop like a limp noodle. The pies are not baked in special brick ovens that produce the blistering heat that can char pies just right. But rather they come out of the standard pizza oven.
What the greater mass craves from Otto are the outrageously devised toppings. The clear favorite has always been their mashed potato, bacon and scallion pie. I had it once and nearly gagged from the sheer excess, a mouth feel that was totally wrong. Of course, the combination of ingredients would be delicious as the recipe for classic mashed potatoes. But piled onto a crust is so much overkill like putting pastry dough over a casserole of mashed potatoes. It works for a knish or pierogi.
Otto salad
Yet there is some precedent for mashed potato pizza in the very city that has made it famous: New Haven, Connecticut is known for two things: home to Yale University and New Haven style pizza. These are shaped as ovals rather than round. And it’s where many pizza purveyors are legendary like Pepe’s, Sally’s and Bar, the latter known for its mashed potato pies. The mash is blended into the topping that covers the thin, crispy crusts.
The Otto menu is, as you’d expect, all about pizza, with a casual nod to side salads of the usual stripe (greens and Caesar to which you can add chicken). But given our seafaring traditions it’s surprising that Otto doesn’t include some local clams in their topping lineup, taking a cue from the pie annals of New Haven pizza magic where pies with clams are another hallmark. That might be too Italian for them.
Sometimes the tomatoes on various pies are fresh—sliced and baked until dry and uninteresting or a sauce, which comes out of a can. As far as I can tell there’s no cauldron in the kitchen in which a sauce has simmered for hours.
The toppings run the gamut from standards like tomato and basil, pepperoni, et al to the weird and not always so wonderful. I’m a purist, and I like my pizza to resemble its Italian heritage rather than fancy gone awry. I’d not lunge after the pizza with sriracha chicken and avocado or pulled pork and mango.
Still, I was in the mood for a sit-down dinner of pizza on a recent evening last week. And of the two Otto dining rooms that could oblige, we chose the Munjoy Hill Otto instead of the Enzo Wine Bar on Congress in the Arts District.
Otto pizza
Service at Munjoy Otto is perfunctory at best. We sat at the bar and the bar-keep was busy making drinks for the entire room; getting served takes some time. But eventually we ordered local beer, a salad and the special pie of the day.
Since this was a casual visit and one that I didn’t plan to review I didn’t take careful notes on all that I ate. What you have are my lasting, if hasty impressions! The special pie, however, forgettable in its entirety, held some sausage, onions and other stuff, which served the purpose of filling us up. The salad that went with was also unremarkable. The dining room has a lot of character with old-wood wainscoted walls and booths, but that’s as far as it goes: serviceable pizza not worth all the hype and a physical space not living up to its potential.
Otto Pizza, 225 Congress St., Portland, ME 207-358-7870 www.ottoportland.com
Rating: Popular but ultimately not so special
Service: Perfunctory
Seating: at bar or booths
Parking: On street
$$$: Standard pricing from $12 to $21+
