Stellar Pizza

In our last AmazonFresh order, we got a free magazine, and I picked Seattle Metropolitan, as the cover story was about local pizzerias. Seward Park's own Flying Squirrel was included, as was a feature on Filiberto's (which was the first place I ate a meal with my husband's family), but Georgetown's Stellar Pizza was totally snubbed. The article got us hungry for pizza, and perhaps the snub made us crave Stellar most of all.



Pizza is a contentious culinary subject, surpassing even the 'Authentic Mexican Food' argument for degree of fervor and number of disparate camps. I gotta give Seattle Met Magazine props for approaching the subject matter carefully, and matching up like-styled pizzerias for their head-to-head evaluations (Best New York, Best Large Slice, Best Greek, etc), to largely avoid the inevitable backlash over how much better thin crusts are than thick, saucy vs. spartan, etc, etc, etc.



I'll try to sidestep the same by prefacing the following with the statement that I'm not a pizza connesieour. I'm pretty equal opportunity, and don't consider one style more authentic or better than another (I'm the same way about Mexican food.) I think there's room for a lot of varieties that appeal to all sorts of tastes.

That said, I happen to really like Stellar pizza. I think it reminds me of the pizzas of my childhood - Shakey's and Alfy's, in particular. The ratio of cheese and sauce and toppings, and the thickness and lightness of the crust bring back really fond memories of standing on my tip-toes to watch them make the pies at Shakey's, then watching cartoons or Laurel & Hardy films on the projection screen while we ate. Or when I was a little older, visiting my sister at her part-time job at Alfy's in Lynnwood, where the lighting was always dim and there was a stone fountain inside that fascinated me.



I remember coveting the slices with the biggest bubbles in the crust - huge air pockets that you could bite through to create a pizza cave. I never seemed to get tired of that, and still to this day marvel at the structure of the crust - so soft, yet strong enough to keep the bubble shape even when biten.



Today, we went for the GEORGETOWNER pizza - Pepperoni, Italian sausage, mushrooms, black olives & onions - which only helped the memories, since those were the ingredients of my childhood pizzas, too. Back then, I washed it down with orange soda, but today I went for a local pilsner from Maritime.