Finding a great pizza wasn't even on my mind when I first visited Arturo Boada's Tanglewood-area restaurant. I expected good pasta from Boada (who was previously at Arturo's Uptown Italiano), and I expected his signature dish -- camarones henesy en hamaca -- to be smashing. But I was also wowed by two totally different pizzas: one a traditional margherita pizza with fine shreds of basil, creamy mozzarella and a chewy crust. The other was a pizza that's far more representative of Boada's style of Italian-Hispanic fusion cooking: carnitas with asadero cheese, a house-made fire-roasted salsa, chopped white onions and fresh cilantro. A squeeze of lime on top brings it all humming brightly together, and folding up a slice of the thin-crust pizza makes for the most interesting sensation of having a street taco and Italian pizza all in one.
4. Dolce Vita
Marco Wiles's pizza joint is, to some, a blatant rip-off of Mario Batali's Otto in New York City -- but who cares? The fact of the matter is that it brought better pizza to Houston and showed the city that there's more to pizza than just the oversauced, overcheesed pies served at sleepovers and Little League games. These Italian-style pizzas feature thin crusts and high-end ingredients, like the noteworthy pear-and-taleggio pizza. Appetizers are wonderful too, from the roasted beets with horseradish to a buttery egg toast topped with shaved black truffle. Although Dolce Vita was temporarily closed by a fire earlier this year, the restaurant is back now and as good as it ever was.
3. Piola
This brightly-outfitted Midtown pizza place is always packed -- and its patio is especially inviting this time of year -- with good reason: The pizza has only steadily improved since it first opened, although the menu of several dozen pizzas is still (in my opinion) far too long. Piola, which is headquartered in Italy but which does a brisk business in Brazil, is also one of only two places in town where you can find catipury cheese (the other being Friends Pizzeria), that unbelievably creamy Brazilian cheese that comes out in fat dollops like mozzarella but spreads like a triple-crème Brie. That's what makes the Salvadore my favorite, with that catipury cheese melting into roasted chicken and spinach, but the Mantova -- beef carpaccio with Brie, diced tomatoes and arugula -- is a close runner up.