You Gotta Try This: In a crowded pizza landscape, the Eileen at Masullo stands out

This is “You Gotta Try This,” The Bee’s series featuring one particular must-have dish at a local restaurant. Each featured dish is nominated by a reader and chronicled at sacbee.com. Got a menu item you want to shine some light on? Email reporter Benjy Egel at begel@sacbee.com.

Bobby Masullo’s Lady Bird years took him to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. He became a better baker at restaurants in Minneapolis, North Carolina and Denmark. Acclaim from Chris Bianco, the godfather of modern America pizza, cast his eponymous restaurant’s name to aficionados across the U.S.

Yet Masullo gets his inspiration from the 73-year-old dessert counter he and generations of other kids walked to while growing up in Land Park. It’s the same place down Riverside Boulevard that added a cafe six years ago and now supplies ice cream sandwiches for Masullo Pizza’s dessert menu.

“The neighborhood is called Land Park and the park is certainly nice, but I think we thought of Vic’s as the central point of it,” said Masullo, 50. “I just wanted to have something like that for my business. Hopefully we’ll be here for a long time to come and earn that kind of reputation.”

It’s no surprise, then, that one of Masullo Pizza’s best pies take their name from a Land Park resident — Bobby’s mother. The Eileen balances fatty toppings with a light, cracker-thin crust, finished off with just enough seasoning to keep it from tasting too rich.

That crust is really what makes the Eileen — or any other Masullo Pizza pie, for that matter — stand out in a competitive local scene. The flour-water-yeast “mother” has been kept alive for years; staff feed it every evening and let it sit for about 18 hours before mixing it in with fresh flour and water, giving the dough more flavor and allowing it to be digested easier.

Masullo then adds salt and refrigerates the dough for about two days, pulling it out the morning of service to let it rise throughout the day, with the exact timing dependent on outside temperature. Upon order, the dough is stretched, drizzled with olive oil and finished with toppings.

“We really take the time to do the dough right and make sure we’re not let it go too long and get sour. The process we use really allows the wheat to shine, which gets to the real flavors that are possible in good bread,” Masullo said. “Obviously, the things that you put on it can matter, but the simplest pizzas taste every bit as good, I think, as the ones that have the more expensive ingredients. Even just a little oregano, tomato sauce and olive oil is delicious.”

But the Eileen does use indulgent, if not expensive, ingredients; mozzarella, black pepper, crimini mushrooms from Premier Mushrooms in Colusa, bacon from Zoe’s Meats in Petaluma and Clover Sonoma cream. Masullo has experimented with more exotic mushrooms over the years, but found seasonal price fluctuations made them tough to provide consistently.

The real Eileen Masullo would scream as a toddler when she didn’t get bacon and steal it off her mother’s plate in her slightly older years, Bobby said. He thought the cream and crimini would pair well with the pork, and customers evidently agree: it’s been on Masullo Pizza’s menu since the restaurant opened in 2008.

The pizza is slid into a brick oven heated between 800-900 degrees Fahrenheit with almond wood from Martinez Orchards in Winters. A cook pulls it out after a minute-and-a-half to two minutes, depending on weather and customer preference, tops it with sage and serves it. Extra-virgin olive oil from Woodland-based Frate Sole is available tableside along with red pepper flakes, salt, pepper and grana padano, a shaved cheese similar to parmesan.

When Masullo Pizza’s landlord closed his neighboring business, Valley Community Newspapers, and put the property up for sale, Bobby Masullo saw the writing on the wall. A new building owner could hike his restaurant’s rent when the lease expired, forcing pizza prices north of the $20 cutoff many customers are willing to stomach (all on Masullo Pizza’s menu are currently $14-$19).

So Bobby Masullo bought the building. He tore down the wall previously separating the businesses, added a few more tables from a redwood that had once stood in Elmhurst and is finishing construction on a glass-paneled private dining room.

After more than a decade of commercial and critical success, other restaurateurs’ expansion plans might look beyond the business next door. Count Bobby Masullo, whose first job was washing dishes at Biba, as a traditionalist in no hurry to build his empire.

“It’d be nice if there were just a few more old-fashioned things like this, (so) that in our rush toward modernization we don’t forget that there’s something to having a place you can walk to and feel part of the community, not the world’s community,” Masullo said.

MASULLO

2711 Riverside Blvd., Sacramento, (916) 443-8929

Info: www.masullopizza.com/

Hours: 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday, closed Monday.

Pro Tip: Masullo’s leftover dough gets baked, seasoned with rosemary, olive oil and salt, and sold for $2.99 a loaf at Land Park grocery store Taylor’s Market. The rosemary bread usually arrives around 2:30 p.m., when available, and is also available in the restaurant.