There are some restaurants lying around town that are so ensconced, so always-there, so been-around-forever, that we start to take them for granted. Like furniture we never sit in, they occupy prime space but don’t exactly affect our daily lives.
Such is the case of Famous Pizza on the corner of South Broadway and Bayaud.
Famous Pizza is just, sort of, there. Always. Mondays at lunch. Tuesdays after work. Saturday afternoons at the other end of the phone when you need a pie delivered. There it is.
Famous doesn’t make a lot of noise, doesn’t maneuver to brand itself, certainly doesn’t have a suspiciously scripted Internet campaign mobilized behind it like some area pizza joints (ahem). It’s not bragging about its billion-degree oven, or its sustainably harvested charcoal, or its one-of-a-kind stone mined from some B.C.-era quarry in the Carpathians.
It’s just a pizza joint.
A fluorescent-lit, storefront, late-night, pizza joint, equally welcoming to early-lunching families with kids and late-snacking post-bar revelers in groups. It’s got a few stacked ovens, a row of self-service fountain sodas and a flickering television set that may or may not survive the February switch to digital.
The pizza itself is, like the restaurant, unassuming, accessible, and satisfying. Pies are big, like street pizza should be, not individual-sized, like wine-bar pizza should be. Slices are hot. Crust is (usually) crispy, yeasty and buttery. Sauce is well-seasoned and richly colored and sweet, in a tomatoey way, not a sugary way. The toppings are ample enough and fresh, but not precious. (Think pepperoni, not prosciutto. Sausage, not house-made double-cured fill-in-the-blank-farm artisan sausage. Mozzarella, not fontina.) Shake on your own red pepper flakes or Parmesan (not Parmegiano-Reggiano) cheese at the table.
Famous Pizza is the kind of place you come to with people you like enough not to have to impress, who you’re comfortable enough with not to have to fill every silence with a point of view. Your expectations will be no higher than a slice, or maybe two, and a little bit of people watching. And they’ll be met at Famous.
As usual.
Famous Pizza
Pizza. Open seven days. 98 S. Broadway, 303-778-7998
