Why Roman

I came up in fine dining. Italian kitchens mostly, for years, working the line and then running it.

When I opened this place I wanted the best edible plate I could make to carry the best ingredients I could get. That's what sent me to Roman. Not thin and not thick. Somewhere in between, with enough chew that you know you're eating bread.

Teglia is the pan. The roasting pan. That's the whole name, and it tells you the method: the dough is proofed in the pan and baked in the pan, and it never touches a peel.

It's a younger style than people assume. Rome had pizza alla pala, the long oval baked straight on the oven floor, for a long time before anybody was making this. Pizza in teglia shows up in Rome around 1958, when a man named Gianni Giochi came down from Terni and started selling square pizzas with oil and rosemary out of a small shop on Viale delle Province. Low hydration, quick rise, lard in the dough. Street food. Cheap and good.

It stayed that way into the eighties, when the lard gave way to oil. Then in the nineties a baker named Angelo Iezzi did the thing that made the style what it is now. He stopped treating it like pizza and started treating it like bread. More water. Much longer fermentation. He worked it out alongside a miller and an oven builder, and in 1991 he won the teglia category at the first World Pizza Championship.

In 2003 Gabriele Bonci opened Pizzarium and pushed it the rest of the way. Soft and open inside, crisp on the bottom, toppings nobody had put on a teglia before. That's when it stopped being a cheap slice and started being something people travel for.

So when I say Roman pan pizza I'm talking about a style that's about seventy years old and got serious about thirty years ago. That's not a knock. It means the good version of it is still being figured out, and I'd rather work in that than in something finished.

What it isn't.

It isn't al taglio. Al taglio means by the cut. You point, they cut it with scissors, they weigh it, you pay by weight. That's how it's sold in Rome, and it's a service style, not a dough style. Plenty of people use the two words interchangeably. I don't, because one of them describes the pan and the other describes the scale at the register, and we don't sell by weight.

It isn't alla pala either, which is the long one baked on the oven floor and served off a wooden board.

And it isn't Detroit. Detroit is its own thing out of Michigan, in a blued steel pan, with the cheese pushed out to the edges so it fries against the sides into a crust. Good pizza. Different pizza. Ours is about half the height and it goes for air, not for that fried cheese frame.

Whole pans or by the slice. A pan travels better than a round pie, because the crust has structure. It doesn't go limp on you in the car.