Pezzella's Pizzeriae Bar

Two university friends came home to Forster after the better part of a year spent working Italian harvests, olives in Tuscany and grapes around Alba, and learning to make cheese and pasta in the villages between. They returned with two small portable wood-fired ovens and a plan, selling Neapolitan pizza at local markets before taking a permanent room on Memorial Drive. The menu stayed deliberately short: hand-shaped pizza from a proper wood oven, a handful of traditional dishes, ingredients pulled from the Great Lakes and grown organically where possible. It is the rare regional Italian that resists the local urge toward generous, generic abundance in favour of doing a few things the way they were taught. The bar and the room make it a night out rather than a quick slice, and booking ahead is wise in summer, when the holiday town's population swells.