There is pizza and there is pizza. Then there’s Scuola Vecchia pizza.
Forget all the other pizzas you’ve ever eaten-the everything but the kitchen sink American-style pies, the thin-crust and deep-dish, the coal-fired and caviar-topped. This three-week-old pizzeria at 522 E. Atlantic Ave. (561/865-5923) makes the best pies you will ever taste, rigorously authentic pizza as it’s been made for 200 years in the world capital of pizza, Naples, Italy.
These are old-school pies (in fact, Scuola Vecchia translates as “old school”) but they will taste brand-new to anyone who thinks of pizza as a heavy, greasy delivery system for cheap cheese, medicinal tomatoes and processed meats.
Scuola Vecchia is the child of Shaun Aloisio and his mother Sharon, who drew both their pizza and design inspiration from Italy. The tiny eatery is a brilliant, immaculate white, finished with blue-and-white tiles, travertine floor, marble table tops and sleek, contemporary furnishings, all imported from Italy.
The centerpiece, of course, is the pizza oven. Also brought over from the boot, it runs on cured oak logs that impart only the barest hint of smoke. At 1,000 degrees, it can cook a pizza in literally 90 seconds. But it’s not just the oven that makes Scuola Vecchia’s pizzas so extraordinary, it’s the double-zero Caputo flour, the precise technique of stretching the dough, and the top-shelf ingredients, from San Marzano tomatoes to house-made mozzarella.
It’s also the commitment to making pizza in the time-honored Neapolitan manner. Shaun Aloisio trained with New York pizza maestro Roberto Caporuscio prior to opening Scuola Vecchia and brought him in as a consultant as the restaurant was opening. It’s also a member of Italy’s Associazone Pizzaliola Napolentani, an organization dedicated to preserving the Neapolitan pizza-making tradition.
The pies that result are really quite remarkable, light and airy and fresh-tasting like no other pizzas around. The crust tastes like fresh-baked bread and is neither cracker-crisp nor charred in like the currently trendy coal-fired pizzas. The toppings are applied with a delicate hand, so when you’ve devoured every last crumb you still don’t feel weighted down and bloated.
Beyond the 21 different pizzas, the menu is simple: a few starters and salads, a trio of desserts. The 25-bottle wine list is composed mainly of wines from small, lesser-known Italian producers, each chosen to complement a specific pizza. For more details go to www.scuolavecchiapizzeria.com but there’s no point wasting too much time there when you can be sitting in Scuola Vecchia, eating what is, frankly, the Pizza of the Gods.
