Once again, a round of Nature’s Most Perfect Food!

Merci Pizzeria Mercado, Mercado San Telmo – Originally a bakery in one corner of the mercado, awhile back the folk here setup a dedicated area for making pizzas. There’s a certain level of ennui present – neither the waiter nor pizzero seem all that interested in attending to the few occupied tables nor making pizzas – yet, somehow, albeit slowly, they get both done. And, the pie that arrives turns out to be worth the wait.

The crust, excellent, one of the best I’ve had in town – befitting one of the neighborhood’s top bread bakeries. Good sauce, not a lot of it, but enough to taste. And really excellent quality toppings, from the fresh mozzarella to the notedly spicy soppressata on our Calabresa pizza. And we really liked the touch of the ribbons of zucchini atop. Overall, a pizza I’d go back for. Oh, and quite good coffee for after munching our way through the pie. 1190 pesos and big enough for two of us for lunch.

Pizzería Serafín, Av. Libertador 932, Recoleta – It’s one of those things you’d think I’d have jumped on five years ago. It was “the list” from, well, the local government. Back in 2017-2019, the city proposed a series of write-in vote competitions for “best of” in each neighborhood in the city. There was no preset list, people were just encouraged to write in and vote for their favorite milanesa joint, steakhouse, pizzeria, and more. Given my on and off obsession with pizzas, when a list of the forty best pizzerias (plus another dozen voted on as the best chain pizzerias) as voted on by almost 20k locals shows up in mid-2018, why didn’t I run out and start checking them out? I can’t answer that. For some reason, it just didn’t occur to me.

Now, it turns out that I’ve been to only fourteen of the forty (though I’ve also been to nine of the twelve chains). I’ve, at least for now, put together a truly amazing presentation of these on a map and I may as well get to checking them out, no?

Starting with the closest to home, I wandered over to Serafín, a little hole in the wall along the busiest avenue around. Empanadas and pizzas abound, their approach is thick, deep-dish, al molde pizza, offered by the slice in a couple dozen varieties. Google reviews leant heavily on their fugazzeta rellena being not just their best slice, but one of the best of that style around.

A repeat of definitions posted many moons back: “Fugazza” is a corruption of “focaccia”, that sounds like the way Tony Soprano might say it, and is, as I understand it, pizza, or focaccia dough, topped with charred onions. “Fugazza con queso” is the same, but with cheese over the onions. And, “fugazzeta” is the reverse, with the onions atop the cheese so that they char. And then there’s a “fugazzeta rellena” which has a double crust with a layer of cheese between and then more cheese and onions on top so that they char. It does get a bit murky, and not everyone is a stickler for these definitions.

The pizzas run to close to an inch and a half thick – a half inch of flavorful, light, beautifully browned crust topped with another half inch of gooey mozzarella that’s actually quite good quality. The remaining quarter to half inch is the toppings. In the case of the fugazzeta rellena, that’s a thin slice of ham and whopping thick layer of onions, and dusted with what appeared to by thyme rather than the more common oregano (it didn’t really have any flavor, but it was there). Quite good. The calabresa was a bit of a disappointment. The crust and cheese just as good, and the thin slices of tomato fine, but the longaniza style sausage was just bland. Usually it’s one the spicier side which is one of the things I like about calabresa pizzas, but this was not. 300 and 260 pesos, respectively, for the slices. I’d return, though it certainly doesn’t make the top of my list for Recoleta.

La Torre de Retiro, Av. Libertador 118, Retiro. Just a few blocks further south along the avenue (and I realized as I was walking and spotted other places, that I never did get back to finishing the “92 Bus Pizza Trek“, and there are several spots to go back and fill in, including this one and the previous one). This place is right across from the Retiro train station and the “English Tower” on the plaza in front. A side note, I noticed that several of the waiters had shirts from different pizzerias, mostly in the lower part of Av. Corrientes. So I asked my waiter what the connection was and he responded “almost all the major pizzerias along Corrientes are the same owner”. Well now, that’s interesting. Also interesting that, I think, all of the ones named on shirts are on the list of neighbor-voted best of the barrio. Wonder if that got “stacked”?

While the pizza menu here is reasonably extensive, though nothing out of the ordinary, only a few of them are available by the slice. Skimming through reviews, virtually no one said anything about the pizzas, or at best, it was “oh, their pizzas are good too”. Everything was about the empanadas, which people raved about. But I was here for pizza. The best I could find were two recommendations for the fugazzeta rellena and one for the napolitana, so I went with a slice of each of those. (340 and 250 pesos, respectively.)

Meh. Just meh. The fugazzeta rellena looks great – beautifully browned and just oozing with two kinds of melting cheese. But it had a weird sour flavor. Whatever the creamier cheese they use in it is, it was sour. Or maybe the onions had vinegar on them. Or something. But it was unpleasant. And everything else about it was bland. When it came to the napolitana the blandness was the only thing consistent. From the crust to the minimal sauce to the cheese, just nothing. The tomatoes were fresh, but… and here’s where a flavor hit came in, they were covered with so much garlic (and maybe garlic powder too) that I couldn’t taste anything else. Meh. Just meh.