There’s a song in “A Chorus Line” that refers to “One Singular Sensation” – a catchy phrase that could refer to singly obsessed restaurants as much as Broadway musicals.
It is not a rare phenomenon. Go to the numerous hawker markets in Singapore, and you’ll find warehouses filled with food stands that make just one single sensational dish. Not just noodles – but one particular noodle dish like the much-loved mei fun. Not just crab – but chili crab, a dish locals can argue about all night, as long as the Tiger Beer keeps flowing.
And while those singular sensation restaurants are a way of culinary life over there, they’re far from unknown here. And ours often come with an option or three, since we do like to have choices. But they’re still built around the one object of culinary desire – a dish that most of us would add to our list of the last foods we’d want to eat before shuffling off this mortal coil. This is Bucket List Cuisine, tasty as it gets.
The dish of choice at Pizzana (13826 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks; 818-698-1009, www.pizzana.com) is pizza – of course. It’s a restaurant created by Candace and Charles Nelson, a power couple whose names may not ring a bell, but they’re previous eateries sure do. They’re the folks who created the Sprinkles Cupcakes chain. And along with actor Chris O’Donnell and Neapolitan import Daniele Uditi – who arrived on these shores with his family’s long-treasured dough starter – they managed to make the upscale pizza of the last decade, which continues to be the pizza of our current decade.
Beginning with a location in Brentwood, Pizzana has spread to Silver Lake, West Hollywood, Dallas and right here on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, adjacent to the magical Mark’s Garden flower shop. (Decorated with thousands of yellow roses last I looked.)
The menus have a penchant for a fairly minimalist look; all the attention is saved for the food. Which in this case, runs to 16 pies of…
Read the full article here