One of the happiest days of my life was when I learned Baggio was doing lunches. Until then they were hit-or-miss, mostly miss, with no pizzas, only pasta, and some months no lunch at all. Frankly not so interesting; pasta doesn’t pay the bills. So when I found out a few months ago that they’d have pizza at noon, I went three times in a week.
Baggio pizza is really the best. Can I repeat that? It’s the best. I know people like to fantasize about things like the fancy place in midtown, or go to Savoy for super-fresh pizza, but Baggio is a more balanced and, dare I say it, better experience. When you go for dinner, they have 4 sections of pizza on the menu; a sauceless section, a saucy section, a sauce-n-cheesy section, and some other mystery section (I think the squid ink pizza is in that section). I can’t remember a bad pizza; for me the crust gets it just right by being not too thin, and nicely chewy instead of crunchy around the edges. If you start with a strong base, pretty much anything will go well on top. Maybe it’s the oven, which is (of course) clearly imported from Italy and holds pride-of-place right in the middle of the semi-open kitchen? It’s been rumored in the past that the staff takes vacations to Italy to practice pizza-making in the native environment.
Oh, I got carried away there. For lunch they only have pizza sets (salad and coffee), and you can only choose 4 pizzas (marinara, margherita, 4-cheese and daily special, which seems to be specially the same every daily – something with shirasu.) The pizza is full-quality but slightly smaller than the dinner size, which makes it just right.
There’s always another section of menu at dinner, both specials and regulars, pasta and anti. Some carpaccio (fish), various oven-baked mshrooms and scallops and things, salads, pastas… and they’re not bad. But you wouldn’t want to let that distract you from eating a ton of pizza, would you?
Seems to have disappeared from Gurunavi…
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