Bar Lupulus
1242 Wellington St. W., 613-759-4677,
barlupulus.ca
Open: Monday to Wednesday 5 to 9 p.m., Thursday to Sunday 3:30 to 9 p.m.
Prices: Chicago-style deep-dish pizzas $27 to $32
Revival Pizza
116 Albert St. (inside Mad Radish),
revivalpizza.com
Open: Monday to Wednesday 5 to 8:30 p.m., Thursday to Saturday 5 to 10 p.m., Sunday 5 to 8 p.m.
Prices: 12-inch thin-crust pizzas $12.50 to $17.25
Stay Gold Detroit-Style Pizza
360 Elgin St., 613-421-4653,
pizzastaygold.com
Open: 4 to 10 p.m. daily
Prices: Detroit-style four-piece pizzas $18 to $22
A long-time dining companion of mine whose waistline had grown in step with the novel coronavirus winter recently resolved to join the everybody’s-doing-it ketogenic diet movement, which is decidedly carbs-averse.
Still, I reached out to him, perhaps tauntingly so: “Want to try some pizzas with me?”
“I may need to have a cheat day,” he wrote back.
“If you’re going to cheat, cheat hard!” I replied. “Chicago deep dish style?”
And so we ordered this month from Bar Lupulus, opting for the most indulgent of its over-the-top doughy options. My friend put his diet aside and took one for the team, while I girded myself for a three-pizza week, the kind of workload I take on so you won’t have to.
Pre-pandemic, Bar Lupulus on Wellington Street West near Holland Avenue was a place I’d recommend for food that was as delicious as it was innovative and eye-catching, as well as its epic selection of craft beers and natural wines. Of course, in the last year it’s been rocked by lockdowns and capacity limits. This year, one of its pandemic pivots has been to offer chef Justin Champagne’s take on Chicago’s infamously hefty pizzas, which typically stack cheese, then meat, and then tomato sauce in their thick crusts, which more closely resembles a pie than a flatbread.
Lupulus sells cheese, pepperoni, sausage and veggie deep dish pizzas with sourdough crusts. But we opted for the pizza special of the week, which was said to weigh four pounds and was ominously dubbed “From Moscow to Montreal” to mark its combination of smoked meat and sauerkraut, three kinds of cheese, served with a Russian dressing dipping sauce. If you’re going to live dangerously by ordering a deep dish pizza, you might as well go all out, we figured.
I admit I never much cared for Frank Vetere’s deep dish pizzas when I was growing up in Ottawa in the early 1980s, and while I’ve visited Chicago twice in the last decade, I didn’t sample the city’s pizzas. I chuckled when comedian Jon Stewart slagged Chicago deep dish pizza, dubbing it “tomato soup in a bread bowl. This is an above-ground marinara swimming pool for rats!”
But Bar Lupulus’s extravagance was a pretty good pizza, if you accept its fundamental premise. It had structural integrity, all the more so because we followed the advice we had received from the bar to let the pizza rest and set for 15 minutes before digging in.
So eating this mass of smoked meat, sauerkraut, cheese, chunky tomato sauce and dough was a tidy, if not genteel, experience. All of the ingredients of this unholy offspring of a Reuben sandwich and a Chicago pizza sang together better than I’d expected, and I liked the jalapeno and fermented chili dipping sauces we ordered on the side.
Lupulus’s pizza pivot is in line with what one Ottawa restaurateur joked darkly to me not long ago, that many restaurants are turning into pizza and burger joints in order to survive. This is funny in part because it’s true, and another example is Revival Pizza, which is the in-house pizza business of the Mad Radish eateries in Ottawa and Toronto.
The first (and only, to date) Revival Pizza opened in October inside the downtown Mad Radish, offering Neapolitan pizza “with a modern twist.” So, if you recoil in horror at deep dish pizza, the thin-crusted specimens from Revival might well appeal.
Last week, we ordered five of the eight pizzas Revival offers (and you can also design your own pizza). The quality was quite uniform, despite the range of options. From the simple pepperoni pie, to the white-sauced wild mushroom pizza with truffle oil drizzle, to the “Godfather” pizza made with prosciutto, artichokes and San Marzano tomato sauce, to the spicy “Portuguese” pizza garnished with piri-piri chicken, Kalamata olives and roasted red peppers and broccoli, each pie seemed like a good expression of what that pizza ought to be.
Especially after a bit of time in my oven to re-crisp their crusts and loosen up their cheese, the Revival pizzas hit the spot. They didn’t quite dazzle me like the best thin-crust pizzas served in town (from Heartbreakers Pizza, if you ask me right now), but they were pretty respectable.
Finally, this review wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the Detroit-style pizzas from Stay Gold Pizza on Elgin Street, which also opened in October.
In 2019, if some U.S. food writers were correct, Detroit-style pizza was having its moment, spreading in popularity far beyond Motown. There, culinary legend has it that rectangular, pillowy pizzas with crisp, cheesy edges and uniformly browned bottoms were first baked decades ago in blue steel pans used by automotive workers.
I don’t know if the buzz about Detroit-style pizzas came and went in the U.S., but I do believe Stay Gold is one of Ottawa’s first purveyors of this pizza style. In short, to love Stay Gold’s pizza, you really have to love bread, because these loaves, if I can call them that, brought to mind focaccia with pizza-like garnishes.
The Bee Sting pizza, made with pepperoni, soppressata and chili honey, tasted meaty, sweet and spicy. It hit the flavour notes of its likely inspiration, the (other) Bee Sting pizza served at the cult-favourite Brooklyn pizzeria Roberta’s. That said, Roberta’s serves thin-crust pizzas, and when I tried its Bee Sting pie several years ago, it was lusciously sauced, which cannot be said of the lighter-on-the-sauce, heavier-on-the-bread Detroit-style variant.
The same topping-to-bread ratio applied to the Shroom Service pizza we had from Stay Gold.
On the whole, they were pizzas worth trying, if only to make a self-respecting foodie’s life complete. But if you think pizzas are about toppings and sauce, and then crust, then you should probably run away from the prospect of eating Detroit-style pizza faster than you can say “keto diet.”