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Casa Bianca Pizza Pie
Sam Martorana had a real pizza pedigree by the time he relocated to Los Angeles from Chicago in the mid-1950s — his father ran a grocery business, and Sam himself had worked a stint at Tony's Pizza back home. He and his wife Jennie, along with Sam's brother Joe, opened Casa Bianca in January 1955, shortly after arriving with three young children in tow, and built the restaurant's entire identity around scratch-made, family-recipe pizza rather than any single gimmick. The sausage pizza is the dish most closely identified with the restaurant: sweetly spiced homemade sausage studded with roasted garlic, piled generously with mozzarella over a crust that's been described as chewy yet crisp, thin but substantial enough to carry real developed wheat flavor rather than just functioning as a base for toppings. The restaurant has stayed a genuine family operation for seven decades — Sam and Jennie's son Ned and daughter Andrea joined the business as it grew, and even in the restaurant's later years, Jennie remained involved in kitchen supervision while Sam personally oversaw the sausage production that gives the signature pizza its specific flavor. Seventy years in the same Eagle Rock storefront, run continuously by the same family, with the same made-from-scratch sausage recipe Sam brought west from Chicago in the 1950s, is a rare thing for any Los Angeles restaurant to sustain — long lines and a no-frills dining room have stayed part of the experience the entire time, treated as a feature rather than something to modernize away. Sam still oversees the sausage; that isn't nostalgia marketing, it's simply how the kitchen has always run.
VS
Pizzeria Mozza
Few new pizza restaurants arrive with as much built-in attention as Pizzeria Mozza did in 2006 — a partnership between chef Nancy Silverton, one of Los Angeles's most respected bakers, and restaurateurs Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich, two of the biggest names in American Italian restaurant hospitality at the time. Highland Avenue, and pizza specifically, was a curious choice for that kind of star power, and the restaurant has spent the better part of two decades justifying it. The crust is the whole argument for Mozza's specific style: a chewy, blistered, notably thin dough with real developed wheat flavor, built to hold up under toppings without turning soggy or collapsing under its own weight. The fennel sausage pizza with panna and scallions has become something close to the restaurant's signature order, though the constantly rotating antipasti and daily specials keep regulars coming back for more than just the pizza. The restaurant has held a place in the Michelin Guide's Los Angeles coverage, recognition for a kitchen that treats pizza with the same technical seriousness Silverton's baking career was already known for before Mozza ever opened. That pedigree — a James Beard Award-winning baker partnering with restaurateurs who'd already built a national Italian-restaurant reputation — is part of why Mozza never had to build a following from scratch the way most independent pizzerias do, but it's the crust itself, refined and consistent for nearly twenty years now, that's kept the restaurant relevant long after the initial buzz of the opening faded. Twenty years on, the wait for a table is still proof the crust was never just coasting on the names attached to it.
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