Hapa Pizza
By David & Susan Greenberg
davidandsusangreenberg@gmail.com
Hapa Pizza, one of the thirty best pizza restaurants in the United States according to the New York Times, serves mainly pizzas with Asian toppings. This is almost a prescription for failure. They might as well serve pizzas with pickled herring. But, by some genius they make Asian toppings work with no compromise. To start, their crusts are ideal: thin, structurally sound, flavorful, blistered. We had one pizza with a banh mi topping that was like a superb banh mi opened up onto outstanding, warm bread.
Another pizza was flavored Thai green curry. We imagined it sopping the crust but somehow they got the curry volume just right so it was held in place by melted mozzarella and the crust stayed dry. You could hold it in one hand and eat it without collapse. Scrumptious! We also had a burrata salad that was a mashup between a Chinese cucumber salad with cherry tomatoes and a burrata with almond-sesame crunchies strewn over. It was a juggernaut of flavor and textural juxtapositions. We loved it.
This is improbably wonderful shoot-for-the-moon pizza that succeeds. We’ll surely go back as often as possible.