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One Oven to Rule Them All: Ancora Pizzeria and Salumeria

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He Said:

Last month I visited Jacksonville.

It gets worse.

While there, I was dragged against my will to a Cheesecake Factory, where I encountered a menu only a little bit slimmer than a Manhattan phonebook. You remember phonebooks, don’t you? Strange artifacts, now extinct, of time when all of your contacts weren’t in your pocket 24/7.

But I couldn’t accuse the cheesecake guys of lying. ‘Factory,’ after all was part of their name, and a factory is exactly what this was. A suburban dining assembly line, resolutely stamping, riveting, pressing, and deploying every item on a Brobdingnagian bill of fare. I immediately made myself less popular among my co-workers by pointing out the rather obvious fact that no establishment can turn out credible representations of twenty different cuisines made-to-order out of one dining room.

It was not a good night.

Such was not the case, however, at the restaurant wrapped around an oven that is Ancora Pizzeria and Salumeria, where we made a long overdue visit last weekend.

Chef Jeff Talbot has partnered with Adolfo Garcia to add another quirky gem to Freret Street, and this is one of the more unusual restaurants in town. What makes Ancora so compelling is Talbot’s utterly single-minded focus.

The centerpiece of the venue is a massive pizza oven imported from Italy, capable of reaching temperatures of more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit. It is here that Talbot produces his Neapolitan pies, following a meticulous set of Pizza rules governing everything from size, constituents of dough, and anything else you can imagine, and culminating in a 45 to 90 second date with the handy inferno.

Salumi (just the Italian word for cured meats) is prepared completely in-house, but nearly all cooked items on the menu are prepared in the oven. A little reductionist and limiting, perhaps? That’s what I wondered, and I posed the question to Talbot as he was giving us the up-close look at The Incredible Hulk’s Easy Bake Oven.

He agreed. ‘I just wanted to do this one thing, really, really well,’ he said. ‘We might do some different things in the future, but not here.’

So this restaurant is like a little haiku, or a sonnet: A rigid, limiting, constricting external structure that demands focus and ensures that excessive quantity cannot be used to mask mediocre quality. The menu consists of the aforementioned pizzas, exacting and in a style you won’t find many places this side of Naples(Yes, the excellent Domenica also has very good pizza, but there are differences between the two. Most notably, Domenica’s ovens produce a crisper crust, while Ancora’s pies are specifically designed to be soft). There are about seven different iterations, including a variable pizza of the day. There is also of course Salumi, a salad, and whatever specials appear. On our visit, we sampled Brussels sprouts with bacon and capers and also medallions of eggplant.

All ingredients are either sourced locally or imported from Naples. There’s a little arty cocktail list with a predictably heavy focus on all things Italian, and a hyper-focused wine list containing only vintages from the region around Naples. Nice details for a restaurant with the explicit mission to reproduce a very narrow indigenous cuisine.

Service was outstanding. Our waiter was well-informed and enthusiastic, giving us the impression that he was passionate about the mission of the restaurant. He made sure to tell us to come back when the gnocchi was on the menu, and helped us navigate the esoteric wine list. A little buy-in from the wait staff goes a long way, a notion to which some places in town should really pay better attention.

How much reach does Ancora have? Not much, by its own admission. But depth? That’s another story entirely. Don’t come here as an alternative to ordering Domino’s, or if you have a big group hankering for something mainstream. Ancora is the antithesis of that. But if it is a faithful plunge into the Neapolitan culinary idiom that interests you (and it should) this is the place for you. Be sure to check out the oven; they love to show it off.



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