The Pizza Composer

Delancey’s owner talks music theory and vegetables
BY ASHLEY GARTLAND
PHOTO BY LARA FERRONI

When you eat at Delancey, you feel like you’re enjoying an intimate meal at a close friend’s home—only in this case the friends are composer-turned-pizzaiolo Brandon Pettit and his wife, local author Molly Wizenberg.

Those who know Molly, or at least know of her through her award-winning Orangette blog and book A Homemade Life, likely followed this food-loving couple’s romance from their first dates to their trip down the aisle.  And if they read that blog faithfully, they might also have known that the musician Molly married harbored a pizza obsession, one that led him to open a pizzeria on a quiet Ballard block last August.

Brandon’s fascination with pizza dough began years ago, when he’d tinker with recipes and cooking methods at home. But the obsession didn’t begin in earnest until the idea of opening a pizzeria took hold. That idea launched a series of educational, taste-testing trips to the nation’s top pizzerias, among them Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, Ken’s Artisan Pizza in Portland, Oregon and Di Fara Pizza in Brooklyn. Brandon tasted the raw dough and crust at each of these eateries, then called on a theory from his musical background to create Delancey’s signature dough.

“There’s a famous music composition teacher named Nadia Boulanger…she had a theory that if you were going to write a piece for an instrument, you would study every piece that’s ever been made for that instrument, figure out your favorite parts of each piece and then do something combining that and something new you wanted to do,” he says. “So I took that concept to pizza and went to all the famous pizzerias in the country and tried to dissect what the best parts about what each of those places were and then combine my favorite aspects of all of them into one thing.”

Brandon makes his dough using just flour, salt, water and yeast but left to rest and rise, it becomes the template for something magical: a crisp, subtly sour pizza crust that is at once slightly chewy, firm, thin and bubbly, with a slight char from its wood-fired baking. Brandon finishes the crust with a bright, acidic tomato sauce that was inspired by sauces at Di Fara Pizza and Seattle’s Café Lago; the resulting pizzas are a blend of styles as well, a sort of Berkeley meets Brooklyn meets Seattle model, he says.

Those pies help pack the house at Delancey and yet the joint has another less-praised asset that helps guide its popularity: Brandon’s former vegetarian lifestyle, which helps him pay tribute to local produce throughout his concise menu (which he tweaks several times each week). Delancey diners can order vegetable-forward standouts such as a Romaine and red cabbage salad and pickled sunchokes as well as pizzas topped with foraged mushrooms, padron peppers and hashed Brussels sprouts. This is a chef who knows produce as well as he knows pizza.

Brandon’s choice to create a vegetable-rich menu wasn’t entirely intentional. But in fitting with the idea that Delancey would showcase what he and Molly enjoy eating at home, the menu quickly became an extension of their dining preferences. “I have more vegetables as a whole menu than a normal pizza place would have,” says Brandon. “I actually had one nutritionist come up to me afterwards and say ‘I’m going to send all my clients here. I’m so glad you have this menu with vegetables and not too much fat or too much meat’.”

The way Brandon eats also informs the type of meat he cooks at Delancey. So though he serves meat-driven dishes like a sausage pizza, he always sources sustainable, responsibly raised pork to make the sausage in house. “I stopped being a vegetarian a couple of years ago but I still only eat what I call happy meat or sustainable meat from animals that had a nice life,” he says. “So I won’t have a burger everywhere and I’ll only eat meat in nice restaurants where I know where it is from or when I make it myself.”

People who knew Brandon a few years ago might be surprised to see him eating or serving meat of any sort. In his former post at Boat Street Café, he cooked meat by smell and look and feel but never by taste. “I was working in restaurants and cooking meat without eating it. If a sauce had meat in it and had to be tasted, I would have someone else taste it for me,” he says.

But when he and Molly set out to open Delancey, he decided it was time to embrace meat. Why the change? “It was a combination of many things. One, I didn’t want to serve any food I didn’t eat in the restaurant. And also, I read The River Cottage Meat Book and in the introduction the author talks about the moral issues surrounding meat,” he says. “What stuck for me was that what is important is giving the animal a really nice life and a really nice death. We are able to do that much nicer than nature.” Whether Brandon is focusing on the source of the meat that tops your pizza or the crust that forms its foundation, such attention to detail is what sets Delancey apart from Seattle’s multiple pizza joints–that and the feeling that when you dine at Delancey, you’ve been welcomed into the couple’s second home.

Ashley Gartland is a Portland-based freelance food writer and recipe developer who has written for MIX, Sunset and Tastingtable.com. She is currently working on her first cookbook, titled Dishing Up Oregon. Read more of her work at www.ashleygartland.com.