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Howie's Artisan Pizza

Chef Howard Bulka studies the art of the perfect slice in Palo Alto

by Stett Holbrook on Dec 23, 2009
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CHEF Howard Bulka left the rarefied world of fine dining to become a pizza geek. The gray-haired Bulka was formerly the executive chef at Marché, an outpost of progressive French cuisine in Menlo Park, but he says that haute cuisine, with its fancy foams, 36-hour roasted meats and high-tech gadgetry, has become “strange, excessive and ridiculous.”

“It’s very refreshing to be out of haute cuisine,” Bulka says. “It’s starting to cave in on itself because of its own excesses. I’d had enough.”

Now he slings slices of pepperoni and dispenses cups of soft-serve ice cream at 5-week-old Howie’s Artisan Pizza in Palo Alto. But these aren’t your typical slices of pie. (nor is the soft serve a run-of-the-mill ice cream. More on that later).

Bulka has made it his mission to give the peninsula “honest pizza.” Howie’s is the kind of place that uses premium ingredients, exacting technique and a bit of “voodoo” in the service of a great pizza. He uses organic and locally sourced products whenever possible. “The world needs a good pizzeria,” Bulka assets. “The time has come to give people an honest product.”

In pursuit of his ideal, he stays up at night reading about the physiology of yeast. He uses a pre-fermented starter, or “poolish,” to begin his dough. He lets the dough rise slowly in the refrigerator to allow tangy, complex flavors to develop. He is working with a carpenter to design a wooden tray that prevents a cooked pizza from steaming itself into sogginess once it’s out of the oven. Safe to say he’s a bit obsessive about pizza: “I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t keep me up a night.”

Bulka admits that the distance between a good pizza and a great pizza is wide. He says that he is a year away from perfecting his pizza. His dough formulation is where he wants it, but the final product varies too much for him. He wants it perfect every time he pulls a pie out of his 600-degree, brick-lined Marsal oven.

Howie’s dining room has a clean, modern feel. It’s a bit cold, but the soon-to-be-installed carpets should take care of that. The kitchen is open, so you can watch the pizza slide in and out of the oven. There’s also a beautiful bamboo-topped bar with a meandering brass inlay. One of the most striking features of the restaurant is the line of yellow, olive-oil-filled vitrines that divides the dining room from the bar.

Howie’s pizza is a blend of styles and borrows a little from the blackened, blistered and bubbling-crust New York school with the thin, elemental style of a Neapolitan pizza. The crust is indeed thin but structurally sound enough so that it doesn’t flop down as you grab a slice. The unsauced part of the crust, or crown, is a thing of beauty. It’s airy and well charred in places and has a satisfying crunchy, chewy quality. The dough also displays a distinct sour tang that’s a product of Bulka’s slow fermentation. It hints at sourdough but with not quite as much pucker.

As a former high-end chef, Bulka would have found it easy to gild his pizzas with fancy ingredients like foie gras and caviar (actually caviar sounds pretty good on a pizza), but wisely he knows that pizza is beloved in America as a simple food with familiar toppings. True, he offers toppings with house-made sausage and wild mushrooms with sage brown butter, but he also serves classics like pepperoni and pesto. He also designs his pizza to travel and even reheat well the next day.

Howie’s pizzas rank among the best I’ve had in the Bay Area. What differentiates them from the growing number of thin-crust premium pizzas out there is their size. These are meant to feed a family or a crowd of football fans. My favorite is topped with house-made pancetta, red onions, spicy Fresno chiles, low-moisture mozzarella and tomato sauce ($15). It’s a substantial pizza that could satisfy two or even three people, provided they got some other things on the side. Good, too, is the aforementioned wild-mushroom pizza ($18). In addition to the mushrooms (pioppino, hen of the woods and crimini), the pizza comes with a load of garlic, Swiss cheese, pecorino cheese and a bit of fresh thyme. I found the brown butter hard to detect.

There’s a small but well-chosen wine list tailored to go with the pizzas. And of course there’s plenty of beer, too.

While the pizzas are the stars here, the starters and salads are quite strong. Eggplant pillows ($7) roll up sweet, house-made ricotta cheese in thin slices of marinated and roasted eggplant topped with a caper-spiked salsa verde. It’s very good.

As long as you don’t mind a mouthful of garlic, be sure to order the garlicky prawns ($9). The prawns are roasted in the oven with a tomato sauce that’s heavy on Parmesan cheese. These went fast at my table.

I tried a few sandwiches, too. The open-faced grinder ($8) piles on mortadella, salami, Swiss cheese, mozzarella, lettuce and red onion with marinated and diced vegetables. It’s good, but I liked the grilled cheese sandwich ($7) better. It’s made with hearty slices of Acme Italian bread filled with a blend of Swiss, Fontina and mozzarella cheeses with marinara sauce for dipping. My favorite part was how the cheese had oozed out onto the griddle and turned lacy and crisp.

Although the blue cheese dressing is applied a little thick, it’s hard not to like the “wedge o’” salad ($8), a hunk of iceberg lettuce larded with bacon, pecans and green onions. For something lighter, the sherry vinaigrette–topped market salad ($7) does the job.

Desserts consist of Straus Creamery’s soft-serve ice cream ($4 or $5 with toppings). Straus is a family-owned creamy in west Marin County that makes outstanding ice cream (and milk, yogurt and butter), but I’ve never had the soft-serve ice cream. It’s just as good as I imagined it to be—creamy, soft and smooth. It’s even better with a little olive oil and sea salt on top. The combination sounds gross if you’ve never had it, but the fruity, grassy olive and flaky fleur de sel will make you an instant convert. I’ll eat yours if you don’t like it.

Bulka says he needs a year to get everything just right, but I say he’s there.

Howie’s Artisan Pizza
Address: 855 El Camino Real (Town and Country Village), Palo Alto.
Phone: 650.327.4992.
Hours: Daily 11:30am–9:30pm.
Cuisine: Pizza.
Price Range: Pizzas $15–$17.
Web: howiesartisanpizza.com.



by Stett Holbrook on Dec 23, 2009
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