My last bite from Mozza

I just finished a light lunch of roasted beet and horseradish salad and bruschetta with salt cod puree and olives. It was just lovely. These were the last bites of yesterday's late lunch at Mozza. My husband and I took two 8 year old boys with us to our reservation at 4:30pm on a Sunday. I had to make these reservations 3 weeks ago.

In fact, my plan was to get our family together with another foodie family and to have a great pizza family fooding adventure. Only it didn't go that way. It's a long story, but the fact is that Mozza will not accept reservations for parties over 6 people. It is a small place. I've since discovered that they have a private room, so for a price, they will allow a larger group to enjoy their great food.

If you don't already know, Mozza is the hot new pizzeria which is a Nancy Silverton and Mario Batali collaboration. This means incredible dough, pastry and breads combined with the best of regional Italian cooking along with handmade cured meats done the old-fashioned way and provided by Mario's father.

It's a tiny little place at the corner of Melrose and Highland Ave. This corner has been begging for attention for years and it's great to see the place all abuzz.

We ordered the two items I mentioned earlier, the beet salad and the salt cod bruschetta, as starters. The boys wouldn't touch them, but we found them excellent. The boys loved their pizza margherita, ordered without basil. They both were quiet for about five minutes while they devoured them.

Bruce and I shared the white anchovy with roasted hot peppers - incredible, lovely clean pickley fish flavor from the anchovy balanced with sweet heat and creamy texture from the roasted peppers pulling it all together.

We also tried the fennel sausage pizza with roasted onions. This one was sweet and oh, so savory. The sausage chunks were dark brown and crunchy on the outside and moist and flavorful inside. The sweet onions just put it over the top.

The dough was, as expected, incredible. Just light enough to have a great crunch and just weighty to hold up to all the great ingredients. I'd make reservations again, just to have another pizza from here.

Another reason to come back would be the caramel and the butterscotch desserts. Oh, wow. The butterscotch Bundino has been mentioned in a few articles, reviews, etc. But we really thought the caramel dessert was even better. The carmel had the crunch of cookie, the incredible sticky cloud of homemade marshmallow, the rich and creamy caramel ice cream and then the salty peanuts sprinkled over the whole thing and sinking into the various textures making craters and being coated by each sweet concoction. MMM.

Mozza really lived up to all the hype. It was worth the planning and although it wasn't the lunch I had originally planned, it was still quite wonderful.