One Great Dish: Pizzeria Da Nella's Funghi Pizza

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Mar 4, 2013 8:40PM

Photo credit: Chuck Sudo/Chicagoist

Travel & Leisure recently voted Chicago as the pizza capital of America, which naturally had our colleagues at Gothamist in an uproar. (Sorry, it's not bragging if you can back it up.)

The T&L article also led to a spirited debate over at Food Republic where TimeOut Chicago’s David Tamarkin stressed the main point of the T&L piece: Chicago’s pizza culture is diverse, with at least three different and distinct styles of note.

The Travel & Leisure piece even noted the growing number of pizzerias building a wood-fired brick oven pizza in Chicago these days and gave a shoutout to Pizzeria da Nella. Terabytes of server space has been used to praise how much of a game changer Nella Grassano has been for pizza in Chicago since she first popped up at Spacca Napoli. What she’s doing at Da Nella is arguably her best work yet.

Monday’s at Da Nella are $7 margherita night. While the simple combination of bufala mozzarella, tomato sauce and basil is often the most-cited example of Grassano’s work, you would be wise to spend the extra money and order one of their funghi pizzas. We did this during a recent visit to Da Nella a couple weeks back, which turned out to be the denouement to an epic meal. With portobello mushrooms, garlic, mozzarella a mushroom puree, this pie is one of the richest pizzas on their menu. The dough, with its requisite chewy texture, provides enough support for the mass of ingredients and looks visibly stunning with its ring of blackened blisters on the outer crust, brought to the table like edible fallen stars.

Pizzeria da Nella is located at 1443 W. Fullerton Avenue.