Point Loma Cafe Takes Pizza to New Heights

Patenting preparations is not an easy affair. For example, a restaurant couldn’t very well patent a pizza, could it, even one as bizarre as the BLT (bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise , for goodness sakes) pizza introduced locally by Sammy’s California Woodfired Pizza of La Jolla.

When Sammy’s opened in 1989, it introduced all sorts of dandy, exotic, delicious and sometimes unfathomably weird pizzas, along with strange and marvelous salads, pastas and desserts. But it didn’t quite manage to retain exclusive control of these, and if La Jolla seems too far to travel for such things as pizza adorned with barbecued or Thai-style chicken, you can find them at Pizza Nova California Woodfired in Point Loma.

Sammy’s brought in Ed LaDou, formerly “consulting” pizza chef at the exclusive Spago in Los Angeles, to draw up the blueprints for its designer pies. Pizza Nova in turn hired one of Sammy’s cooks, a point that becomes ever so obvious upon a first read of this restaurant’s menu, which looks rather like Sammy’s redux.

Pizza Nova formerly was known as the Reel Inn, a seafood house that did extremely well with its offerings and pushed a pointedly casual--servers wore jeans--California atmosphere. Despite the quality, the level of business evidently was unsatisfactory, and earlier this year the place re-engineered itself into Pizza Nova. The casual atmosphere and the attractive, modern and comfortable decor remain.

The menu is quite wonderful, and the kitchen by and large lives up to it, with certain notable exceptions. There is a trick to ordering from this menu that applies to any party larger than one: Order everything for the table to share, beginning with a salad or two, possibly progressing to a pasta and certainly to one or more pizzas, and saving room for dessert.

With each course, the servers automatically bring plates for everyone, and even the hot fudge sundae is susceptible to as many as three spoons (beyond that point the only recourse is to order a second sundae, or perhaps a portion of the pleasant if unexceptionable apple crisp). The rule might be that, while the act of consuming a plate of spaghetti is sufficiently self-absorbing to allow for solo dining, most of the dishes on the Pizza Nova menu cry out for a crowd.

Since only two local restaurants offer most of these dishes, we are still in the realm of the novel. One of the salad list’s nicer offerings is the chopped salad, an Italianate variation on California’s indigenous Cobb that reduces salami, turkey breast, tomatoes, cheese, onions and fresh basil to relative atoms and combines them into a new flavor molecule. The menu mentions a mustard vinaigrette with this, but mustard seemed to be missing from the equation when this salad was sampled.

A lighter and more elegant plate of greenery combines chopped Romaine and a rather restrained amount of watercress with crumbled Gorgonzola cheese and toasted walnuts; the flavors blend to produce a sophisticated result. Roasted marinated peppers, paired with anchovies and served with grilled garlic bread, adopt a rustic point of view but are not executed all that well.

Other choices in the salad department (the only sort of starter course offered) include the inevitable Caesar, a hot spinach number enriched with olives and feta and Parmesan cheeses (kind of a Greek salad gone uptown) and an albacore salad that, rather astonishingly until one enters into the Pizza Nova idiom, can be ordered served upon a cheese-less pizza crust.

The “pasta nova” is a play on words that tosses Nova Scotia smoked salmon with tomatoes, scallions, cream sauce and fettuccine. The Fish Market downtown serves quite the same dish but calls it “pasta con nova.”

Angel hair pasta with fresh tomatoes, basil and garlic is offered everywhere these days, but Pizza Nova does justice to this light, uncomplicated and satisfying dish. The angel hair in a gingered black bean sauce with broccoli, scallions and a choice of shrimp or chicken is as exotic as it sounds, but a recently sampled offering came off as a dull and even bland concoction; novelties sometimes are best left to carnivals.

The pasta list progresses with fettuccine with chicken and tequila-lime cream sauce; linguine with chicken in a Thai-style peanut sauce; penne with sun-dried tomatoes, garlic and broccoli and, on an altogether more sedate note, a simple lasagna with cheeses, basil and tomato sauce.

The BLT pizza frankly sounds alarming, although folks who have tried it (and servers at Pizza Nova) insist it is quite a treat. This is perhaps the most challenging offering on a list that begins with a plain old cheese pizza and continues with the classic Neapolitan Margherita (cheese, sliced tomatoes, basil and garlic; simple but delicious).

The New York-style pie with pepperoni, sausage and mushrooms is every bit as succulent as it ought to be, while the vegetarian pie--host to a gathering of broccoli, onions, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes and grilled eggplant--may hold a special appeal for people who wore Earth Shoes in the 1960s.

The novelty of garlic-shallot butter attends the pizza dressed with roasted garlic, Maui onions and grilled shrimp or chicken. There is also a duck sausage pizza with spinach and roasted garlic; a Mexican, lime-marinated chicken pizza with salsa, sour cream and guacamole that was attempted in a spirit of adventure and found reasonably interesting, and a pizza Nova with lox, goat cheese, onions and capers.

The Thai chicken pizza lacked oomph; certainly the advertised ginger flavor was lacking, and the kitchen needn’t have been so parsimonious with the peanuts and cilantro. The goat cheese pizza, on the other hand, was rich and delicious with its modernist cargo of sauteed spinach, diced Italian bacon, slivered red onions and creamy goat cheese.

The menu offers, in addition, a couple of cheese-less pizzas and two calzone, a fairly calm version stuffed with prosciutto and cheeses and the moo shu chicken calzone, a Chinese hash moistened with a dose of hoisin sauce. Just how this might be greeted in Naples is difficult to imagine.

The dessert list returns to the simple and all-American, and the hot fudge sundae is hard to beat, although it seems rather highly priced at $4.

PIZZA NOVA

5120 N. Harbor Drive

226-0268

Lunch and dinner daily.

Credit cards accepted.

Most entree items cost $6.35 to $9.50.