RESTAURANTS : Let’s Hear It for Genuine French Pizza

For a pizza chef so devoted to his craft, Caioti’s Ed La Dou isn’t much concerned with tradition. First he tells you, “There’s no such thing as a good Chicago pizza.” Then he casually remarks, “Compared to the French, Italian pizza is boring.”

French pizza? Well, what do you expect from the man who auditioned for the job as Wolfgang Puck’s original pizza chef at Spago with a mustard, ricotta and pate pizza? (“Not my best pizza,” La Dou admits, “but I got the job.”)

Despite the restaurant’s Italian name, Spago’s pizzas were in fact modeled after the pizza served not in some remote Italian trattoria but in a little French bistro in Provence called Chez Gu. Puck was seduced by the pizzas baked in Chez Gu’s wood-burning oven; he most likely munched on pissaladiere, an often rectangular-shaped “pie” loaded with caramelized onions, anchovies, black olives and herbs. No tomatoes. No mozzarella.

“The French are much more creative and liberal in their compositions,” La Dou says. “Even when the Italians have fresh resources, they won’t apply them to pizza. The French will look around their kitchens for any ingredients that are fresh and say, ‘Whatever.’ But the Italians just mutter, ‘It’s not Italian.’

Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters says, “There are a lot of things that I consider sacred in food, but pizza is not one of them. It’s like a clear piece of paper; you put on it what you like. There isn’t any particular tried-and-true tradition.”

It was Waters’ French-like attitude that helped spawn the California-pizza movement. (Puck didn’t open Spago until after he saw what Waters was doing with her wood-burning pizza ovens.) “The goat cheese, the duck sausage and the use of fresh regional ingredients--those are all things that Alice (Waters) brought back from France,” La Dou says.

But while Waters freely admits to French influences in much of her cuisine, she insists that her pizza ideas came from Italy.

“I really don’t think of pizza as being French at all,” says Waters, who spent years eating in France before leading the California-cuisine revolution in Berkeley. “Pizza has about as much credibility in France as (chain pizza parlors) do here. The only time I ate pizza in France was when I was a student and hungry and didn’t want to spend more than five francs for dinner.”