Day 107: Spacca Napoli

May I take a moment to whine? Blogging is hard! Today's post is not about What We Ate Today; rather, it's What We Ate a Week Ago When The Husband's Brother Was in Town But I Didn't Have Time to Throw Onto the Blog Whatwith the Craziness of Thanksgiving And All. Anyhoo, what we ate today wasn't very exiciting anyway: pancakes and bacon, leftovers for lunch, and leftovers for dinner.

So last week Friday (gosh, was it actually two weeks ago?) we packed up the entire family -- The Husband, his parents, his brother and his brother's wife and three kids, and our two kids -- and journeyed to the Ravenswood neighborhood to finally, finally try the pizza at Spacca Napoli, one of the wave of Neapolitan pizzerias that have opened in Chicago recently. It has gotten unmitigated raves, pretty much, since it opened a couple years ago so naturally I was curious. The restaurant is an unassuming two-room space; on one side there's the open kitchen with its bigass oven, on the other is a room of tables. I would estimate that the restaurant can accommodate maybe 50 diners at a time. Not huge.

The house salad. It's your standard-issue mesclun mix but the salad includes a bunch of super delicious fresh green olives. They didn't seem brined at all and tasted fruity in that way you sometimes associate with nice olive oil. The flesh was crisp and full of green, earthy flavor. YUMMY. The Husband's father, Terry, ordered the soup of the day, minestrone. It was really good, too. Thick but not pasty, rich with a smoky bacony or hammy flavor, and no filler pasta that we can recall. Also YUMMY.

The prosciutto-and-arugula pizza. It looks a little anemic in this picture, but boy was it YUMMY. The deal with the crust at Spacca, as the regulars like to call it, is that it's so thin people talk about the pizzas being a little "wet" in the centers. This one didn't have that problem, or quality, at all and was a great combination of the salty and the bitter. Actually, it was more like a ham sandwich than a pizza (a ham sandwich is The Husband's idea of perfect food). He loved it. Other pizzas ordered at the table: Margherita (it's a cheese pizza; was YUMMY but not amazing); a cheese-less Marinara pizza (so few toppings it's practically not there but strangely compelling); the Funghi pizza (didn't get the report on this one); and the sausage pizza (forgettable, I guess, since I can't remember anything about it).

Zabaglione, an Italian custard, with raspberries; and, next to it, pistachio gelato. Both were pretty OK. I'm not going to declare them YUCKY per se, however, the zabaglione had a grainy texture that I didn't like and the pistachio gelato was one-dimensional, almost like it needed salt or something. Fatty and flaccid. I do love the way the raspberries look resting in the custard like jewels on a pillow.

SPACCA NAPOLI, 1769 W. Sunnyside Ave.; 773-878-2420, spaccanapolipizzeria.com: WIGB? Hell yes! It may not be the most awe-inspiring pizza ever made (crust could have been more blistered and crackly for me) but it's a solid neighborhood joint doing an authentic kind of Italian thing. What's not to love?