Once I was finally home from bread making on Saturday at 1pm and had grand plans to clean my apt and sleep, I discovered a voicemail from a friend asking, would you want to go to Berkeley right now? Of course!

So, we sat in traffic on the 80 until we landed in town, and I promptly ate a hot dog at Top Dog. There were so many dogs to choose from, but since we were going out for pizza in a few hours, I opted for the Bird Dog - low fat turkey hot dog with cilantro. It was fantastic. Served in a soft sesame hot dog bun, it had the perfect snappy outside and meaty inside. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was also spicy (the meat was quite red) and juicy–which is admirable for a low fat dog. Oh, and when I’m tired (a good tired), dazed, and sporting chef’s hat head, this is how I look while eating a Bird Dog (special thanks to L, my guest photographer).

We walked around the town of Berkeley, replete with students, sidewalk orators and booths, a funky assortment of stores (including an Amoeba!), and its beautiful classical campus.

Then it was time to eat again. So, we drove off to Zachary’s Pizza, which, as the scores of awards and articles on its walls will tell you, has delicious pizza. It specializes in Chicago-style stuffed pizza, but it also has thin crust available. Their system is a bit confusing when you get in the door — with a line against the wall that simultaneously leads to the cash register on one end (where you can pre-order as you wait) and to the hostess station on its other end, and also just contains people waiting for to go order here and there.

Anyway, we pre-ordered, waited almost 40 mins for our table at about 6:40pm on a Saturday night, and were presented with our pizza pretty soon after being seated. It’s a great pizza. A thick flaky crust holds a glorious melted… uh, how do you say?… brick of pristine white mozzeralla cheese topped by chunky red tomato sauce. Our cheese was studded with small diced sausage, onions, and peppers, and I liked that better than the more common huge chunks of stuff on pizza. This way, every bite is different, but nicely balanced flavor and consistency-wise. It’s a worthy rival of any celebrated stuffed pizza pizzeria in Chicago. One thing that I missed in the Zachary’s pizza was the tang of salt from the bottom of the crust when it first meets your tongue that many of the pizzas in Chicago had. Again, though, it’s flavor all around was balanced, so that hit of salt wouldn’t fit into that. I also found myself thinking about the flakiness of the crust of the pizza relative to the breadiness of the most thin crust pizzas, and applying my CIA knowledge, realized that the flakiness is needed to act as a barrier to the large amount of moisture inside, much like a flaky pie crust holds in very moist fruit fillings while short, mealy pie crusts hold less watery goods. Very functional.
Another great thing about Zachary’s is that you can take home a half-baked pizza to heat up at home and enjoy the taste of fresh pizza. You can even call ahead to order it.

Also, Zachary’s was begun by a husband and wife team, but when they were ready to retire, they instituted an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), which makes the employees the collective owner of the pizzeria. Here’s an article that explains it better than I could.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 6:45 pm and is filed under NorCal, Restaurants, Sampling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.