Pazzo

Crazy Good Italian Food!

I think when we all talk about Italian food, we tend to forget how sophisticated Italian food can be because for many people, it’s picking up a pizza or boiling some pasta with a canned sauce. However, what makes the best Italian places so special is their usage of fresh ingredients and the development of simple, yet bold flavors that cause an explosion in your mouth. Pazzo certainly does all of this, while modernizing this “traditional” food cuisine.

When we talk about making Italian food “modern” we are simply referring to the fact that Pazzo doesn’t simply offer an array of multiple pastas and parmesans. We are talking pastas with more intricate pairings in terms of sauces and ingredients. All the dishes contain elements that we would deem to be “of higher quality”, elevating each dish to be complex in nature, but simple with the flavors. The pizza menu itself is quite surprising, creating different combinations that you can’t find elsewhere. To highlight these modern elements that Pazzo provides, we got a duck confit flatbread, Prince Edward Island mussels with angel hair pasta, brick oven roasted chicken, and a tiramisu cheesecake, with many different pizzas too.

The flatbread itself seemed quite different because when you think of a traditional Italian dish that has a dough base with toppings, your mind would immediately drift to a pizza, but in this case a flatbread was used because the idea behind making the dish seems more refined, which is reflected in the choice of ingredients. This flatbread consisted of a duck confit, truffle boratta, purple onions, prosciutto, arugula, roasted red peppers and topped with a balsamic vinegar. This is certainly a combination one could never find on a pizza. The ingredients used were of such high quality, truffles infused in a classic boratta cheese to add a rich, flavor with the cheese, yet a unique taste with the truffle. The arugula countered this with its slight bitterness and the duck had fatty elements to it. This certainly was an elegant flatbread with a combination of neat ingredients that made a unified dish.

While we did get a pasta with a sauce, the Prince Edward Island mussels with angel hair linguine was nothing basic. These mussels were steamed with a saffron and white wine broth with cherry tomatoes and other fresh herbs. The broth acted like a sauce for both the mussels and pasta, and its flavor profile was developed so that it would complement both aspects. The broth wasn’t heavy at all so its slight acidity was nice with the mussels, and its slight richness was good with the pasta. The pasta was cooked perfectly and the mussels tasted extremely fresh!

The brick oven roasted chicken was actually just a half chicken with a savory bread pudding of portabella mushrooms, bacon, pecans, cheese and focaccia with glazed baby carrots. The chicken was nicely cooked and juicy and the baby carrots were sweet, fresh and crunchy. However, the best part of that dish, and maybe even the meal was the portabella mushroom bread pudding. This is what is great about elevated Italian food. They are able to play with different ingredients and techniques to create new things, while keeping the items themselves simple and natural. This bread pudding of portabellas was savory and decadent bold in flavors. There was nothing too strong about it, it was simple and tasted amazing.

We were also able to try some of Pazzo’s pizzas. Their pizzas are done “New York Style” with a thinner crust. What we liked about the crust was it wasn’t too thin, and it wasn’t too thick so the pizza was able to be cooked all the way through and still be crisp. The aspect that was even better was the combinations of pizza. We were able to get a chicken Caesar salad pizza with an actual salad on top, an Italian chicken pizza, with chicken, tomatoes and garlic, and a bacon ranch pizza. These pizzas certainly exceed the flavors and quality of standard chain pizza place. These ingredients are unique and fresh and paired well. Exploring the different combinations is really cool too, as many of the combinations would be inaccessible in other establishments. This all plays with the modern theme that the restaurant has going for it.

Finally we got the tiramisu cheesecake. The tiramisu flavor didn’t pop out entirely like it would with a standard tiramisu, and this is one of the few flaws with modernizing traditional food. Some things are meant to remain the way they are, like the tiramisu. Trying to blend tiramisu into an already rich cheesecake is super innovative, but won’t always capture the essence of the tiramisu. Even though it wasn’t a bad dessert, we would have liked it to pop more.

Overall, Pazzo is certainly a place worthy of trying. It is super easy to access Italian food, but getting modern and fresh Italian food is not always easy, and luckily Pazzo is located here in Chapel Hill. What makes it enticing is that there’s so many flavor profiles that you wouldn’t see in Italian food that is provided in Pazzo, and they make it work. Plus, where else can you find salad on a pizza? I bet not another place nearby!