All that is by way of background. When I hear and read that much good about a place, part of me is thinking, "this is going to be great!," and part of me is thinking, "don't believe the hype." But I try to keep an open mind.
We got seated and served promptly. I'd been here years ago when it was 2 Vine, and it seemed better laid out and less noisy, despite being busy.
After sharing a beet salad, which was quite good, my wife and I shared two pizzas: a mozzarella pizza, with tomato, basil and Parmesan, and a prosciutto pizza with fontina, arugula and Parmesan. So a red and a white pizza.
That in itself didn't raise alarm bells. I've had too many "wood-fired" pizzas where they just briefly expose the outer edge to a flame to get it blackened, but the crust still sucks. It's not all about blackening.
But wood-fired or otherwise, it starts with the crust. And this was, well ... hmm.
Quite thin, up until I reached the cornicione, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it wasn't enough to sustain or balance the toppings. It was floppy and more significantly, it wasn't interesting.
What I mean is, with great pizza, the crust should be so good that I'd be happy to eat it with no toppings at all. This wasn't that.
Nor did it improve as I worked my way to the cornicione. Again, with top-notch pizza, that's almost the best part, as you get to enjoy the texture and flavor, unadorned. This was reminiscent of supermarket Italian bread. Not "bad," exactly, but bland and lifeless.
I also know that the best wood-fired pizzerias I've been to get their ovens to a very high temperature, often 800 or above. A thin-crust pizza can bake in 90 seconds or so. REDD's was at 655 degrees, hotter than a typical home oven but not what you want for getting the most out of a wood-fired oven.
I also noticed that the crust of the prosciutto pizza had separated between the top and the bottom. When properly done, that shouldn't happen. There are reasons why that might happen, but I'm not diagnosing the problem, just identifying it.
OK. Enough about the crust. Let's move on to the toppings.
The mozzarella pizza was well-laden with tomato sauce, but to me the sauce was over-applied. Pizza is also about balance and there was too much sauce, for my taste, on such a thin crust.
Nor was the sauce especially interesting. It tasted like sauce you'd get out of a jar. Not that you can't get good sauce from a jar, but this wasn't it. It tasted to me like generic spaghetti sauce.
I was expecting a salty kick from the prosciutto on the prosciutto pizza, and I didn't get it. The pie was bland. I like a nice white pizza now and then, but without tomato sauce I'd like a bit of a flavor boost from the toppings, and this didn't deliver.
Not to drag my wife into this, but she agreed with me on all these points, and I can assure you she is unafraid to disagree with me, so I am pretty sure she was being honest. Toward the end of our dinner, I mentioned to her a thought that had just occurred to me: as a bcnchmark, could I make a better pizza at home? I have had the good fortune to have pizza at various pizzerias that I couldn't possibly hope to match, due to the limitations of my home oven and my pizza-making skills. But we both agreed that I can make and have made better pizza at home, than what we had here.
Now all this sounds as if I've been trashing and bashing REDD. I suppose I have, but that was not my intent. Despite all I've said, I liked the pizza.
Not too many years ago I would've been amazed to get pizza this good anywhere around here, much less at a restaurant, where pizza is just an add-on to the menu. But the bar has been raised. That's a good thing, as the general level of quality and the range of options have both gone up.
But if you're running a high-end restaurant, and you want to include pizza on the menu, I think it's incumbent on you to make sure it's damn good pizza. I can't honestly say that this was.
REDD Rochester
24 Winthrop St.
Rochester, NY 14607
Mon. - Thu. 5 pm - 10 pm
Fri. 11:30 am - 2:30 pm, 5 pm - 10 pm
Sun. closed
