It is a truth universally acknowledged by my better half that I think about pizza way more often than I should. In times of great distress, it’s one of my go-to comfort foods.
I don’t order it as often as Brendan Fraser’s character does in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale but the temptation to do so remains a clear and present danger to my waistline. Donato Enoteca’s revamped menu recently presented me with another opportunity to indulge my weakness for a new (to me) and, frankly, irresistible kind of pizza.
Pizza in padellino originated in Northern Italy but it reminded me of the first deep dish pie I tasted in my adolescence. Modeled after a Chicago-style pizza, it was served hot from the oven in a cast iron container with a highly risen crust. The dough got crispy and browned around the edges, bubbling up to form thin edible spikes. But the center remained a pliable and tender chew.
Donato Enoteca’s dough is similar but not mass-produced. The pizza isn’t smothered by cheese and all the other toppings. We tried an in padellino with burrata and prosciutto ($18). It’s made without any sauce so the diner tastes the salt and olive oil—in what is essentially bread that’s reminiscent of a rounded focaccia—as much as the slowly melting cheese and the pink petals of carefully folded ham.
The only other Bay Area pizza that rivals Enoteca’s pizza in padellino is Roma Antica’s pinsa. This small Italian restaurant in San Francisco makes a similar flatbread but they also add arugula and pesto. Last December, I watched the cooks remove our pinsa from a wood-fired oven before the server delivered it to our table on a wooden plank. Bellissimo.
Donato Enoteca first opened in 2009. It’s part of the Donato Restaurant Group, which also operates CRU in Redwood City and Donato & Co. in Berkeley. I’ve walked by Donato & Co. dozens of times and, for some reason, haven’t tried it yet. Earlier this year, the chef-owner of Enoteca Donato Scotti refurbished the interior with the prominent addition of a white marble bar. Customers who sit there can order drinks and eat from a cicchetti or small bites menu.
Scotti, who was at the restaurant when we ate there, is an affable, easy-going host who enjoys talking about his food and the recipes. For the reopening, he also hired Veneto native Marco Bertoldo to lead the kitchen. Before he took the job, Bertoldo left Poesia, another San Francisco neighborhood spot that makes well-loved Italian food and pastries in the Castro. The updated Enoteca menu encourages diners to order shared plates so we followed that suggestion.
The dinner menu is divided into three categories, the garden, the sea, and the butcher. Some of the items on the lunch menu carry over into the more expansive dinner menu but they don’t mirror each other exactly. We started the meal with riso al salto e porcini, a crisped saffron rice cake ($19). The cooks cover half of the cake with a cauliflower and porcini mushroom “ragù.” The plate is then finished with a circle of green garlic oil, nasturtium petals and parsley from the mother country.
Our second starter was a zucchini boat, zucchina ripiena ($15), baked and filled with sausage, bread crumbs and stracciatella cheese. The cheese is spread across the boat in a series of short white nautical stripes that melt over the edges. It’s a busy plate of food without a hero flavor but sometimes gooeyness is all that matters.
The cannelloni ($14/$23) glistens with a pure white ricotta ooze. Black dots of balsamic vinegar and dark green puddles of a spinach besciamella sauce collide against and drift into each other. The visual contrast is striking but it’s also a sumptuous, luscious pasta dish.
While all these carbohydrates were digesting, the last entrée to arrive was a pasta patate e provola ($14). This Neapolitan pasta plate was a combination of potatoes, provola cheese, and unidentifiable pasta shapes swimming inside of a bright orange sauce. It looked and tasted like an Italian version of macaroni and cheese. It was the least sophisticated dish that we tried but the best one to please a fussy child’s bland and demanding palate.
Donato Enoteca, open everyday for lunch and dinner. 650.701.1000. 1041 Middlefield Rd., Redwood City. donatoenoteca.com
