The Pie

The best Chinese restaurants, almost by definition, seem always to be at least 20 minutes from where you happen to be; in Chinatown if you’re on the Westside, in Rowland Heights if you live in Norwalk. All the best Thai places are in neighborhoods you probably can’t find without a Thomas Guide.

The best pizza place, though, is always the most passable one within striking distance of your home, because having pizzeria be great is less important than having it be right there , someplace to drop into on the way to the movies or to stop by for takeout on the way home from work or to feed three kids and get change back from your twenty. Damiano’s if you live near Fairfax, Vittorio in the Palisades, Mama Petrillo’s in Temple City, Jacopo’s if you live in Beverly Hills--the absence of schlep seems to magically season pizza the way a picnic basket flavors fried chicken. Plus, you actually get the pizza home while it’s hot.

But of all the neighborhood pizza parlors out there, each of them touted as the best in the Southland, one of them actually has to be the best. And after chomping my way through half the pies in Los Angeles County--I had to: my local, La Strega, shut down last year--I’m pretty sure that the Casa Bianca Pizza Pie is the one. I realized I was on the right track when a mild-mannered View Section reporter, fond of exchanging restaurant gossip, suddenly turned ugly when I asked him about the place.

“You realize that if you write about Casa Bianca,� he said, “I’m going to have to kill you. Slowly. After I break both your legs. It’s hard enough to get in on a Saturday night as it is.�

Casa Bianca is located on a lonely stretch of Colorado dominated by small apartment buildings and Rose Bowl motels, somewhere between Highland Park and Eagle Rock and usually a long block from a parking space. Its classic neon “Pizza Pie� sign, a massive old thing, glows in nursery pink and blue. From the outside, it sometimes looks all misty and gloomy, like something evocative and late-’40s out of an arty new-wave gangster film.

When you step into the foyer, you’re whomped with the smell of garlic and the roar of many, many people being happy. The walls of the waiting area are plastered with autographed celebrity photos--Ernest Borgnine, the metal band Junkyard, a young and cute Ed Asner--and a Perma-Plaqued 1973 interview with the owner from what looks like a produce-company journal. Sam Martorana has aparently been running the place since early in the first Eisenhower administration.

Tables are covered with red-checkered tablecloths; there are a zillion Moretti beer signs on the walls; red-pepper flakes and grated cheese are there right next to the salt and pepper shakers; the wine selection is limited to pink, white and red. If you listen hard, you can hear big-band music from the speakers overhead. This is the pizza parlor all Americans have been conditioned to look for since early childhood.

The salad to get is something called “ 1/4 Head of Lettuce,� which is a big crisp wedge frosted with anchovy fillets, drizzled with Italian dressing, and surrounded with big heaps of chopped black olives, hot peppers and red-ripe tomatoes, something you might expect to have found at a Chicago steakhouse in the ‘50s.

Pastas, most of them, are just OK: lasagna, linguine and clams, spaghetti with marinara sauce, mostaccioli with sausage, all bathed in industrial-strength tomato sauce and pumped up with breathtaking amounts of garlic. Veal Parmigiana, while on the crude side, is actually kind of tasty.

And the pizza--well, the pizza is just the best, especially the sausage pizza: speckled with sweetly spiced homemade sausage, shot through with mellow cloves of roasted garlic (if you order them) and topped with plenty of the kind of mozzarella cheese that forms something as tangly as the cords on an old-fashioned telephone switchboard when everybody has taken his or her slice.

Tomato sauce is sparingly applied, a bit of tartness to cut through the richness of the cheese and of the sausage (the eggplant topping, lightly breaded, is pretty good too); the cheese and sauce reach nearly to the edge of the crust, which lets you avoid the touchy problem of what to do with all those leftover pizza edges. The crust is chewy, yet crisp enough to maintain rigidity while you maneuver it toward your mouth; thin, yet thick enough to give the sensation of real, developed wheat flavor, and with enough carbony, bubbly burnt bits to make each bite slightly different from the last. And any leftovers taste superb with your morning coffee.

In other words, Casa Bianca makes a pizza worth driving across town for. But leave Saturday nights around 7 for my friend, OK? I sort of like my legs the way they are.