At some point during the evening, Brandi Key disappears from the dining room and slips back into the kitchen. She's spent the better part of an hour chatting with diners, assisting the servers and overseeing the kitchen like a proud mother whose children are proving they were listening after all when she taught them how to make the perfect pizza dough. Though Key is a gracious host and clearly relishes watching diners enjoy the fruits of her labor, getting her hands onto a round of dough is what really lights her up.
"There's nothing more fascinating than water, yeast and flour," Key said in an interview back in 2012, before the osteria became a reality. After dining on her fanciful creations made with those three ingredients, I'm inclined to agree.
It's the simplest food at Coppa — the pasta, the pizza crust, the ground meat mixed with a few spices and formed into delectable little balls, the sinfully smooth tiramisu — that has the greatest impact, and that seems to be Key's intent. Diners will always seek hyper-traditional Italian dishes or modernized takes containing 15 extra ingredients, but the middle ground struck by this osteria is certainly a worthy goal. Like a good dough, it just needs some time to rise.
