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Restaurant review

Home-baked takeout

At Nick-N-Willy's, the kitchen assembles the pizza, and your oven does the rest.

By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published September 29, 2005

	[Times photos: Cherie Diez]
	Uncooked, the Aegean shows its freshness. It has an olive oil glaze, mozzarella, fresh garlic and spinach, marinated sun-dried tomatoes and feta.
	Nick-N-Willy’s Big Kahuna pizza has fresh tomato sauce, mozzarella, cheddar/provolone, Canadian bacon, pineapple and mandarin oranges.

This is one more half-baked idea from the West Coast: takeout pizza that's not ready to eat. It gets my full endorsement.

This is not a pitch for raw food. The pie you buy is sauced, topped and baked half to three-quarters of the way through. When you get it home, its last five minutes in the oven make your house smell like a teenager's dream Thanksgiving and make the pie as crisp as you want it.

In the San Francisco area for a month this summer, I found half-baked pies a delicious partnership with great bakers, new artisans and old pizza hands, and foodies in a hurry.

What has arrived here is Nick-N-Willy's, one of several chains seeping eastward serving take-and-bake pizza. It is more or less the same concept, except the pie is not cooked at all. Raw pizza has obvious advantages in freshness. Since you can see the ingredients, they have to be fresh and generous, and at Nick-and-Willy's they're handsome and mountainous. The dough is made daily with olive oil and tossed to order. Plus, it will be eaten fresh from your oven without waiting in cardboard for a 15-minute drive home.

That you do the cooking is also the drawback. With a confederate at home to preheat the oven, it can still take a good 15 minutes to bake one.

Instructions specify 425 degrees but leave timing broad, at 10 to 18 minutes. Your call.

Don't worry about the temperature. The dough is formulated like a bread batter to cook in a home stove without the blistering 600 degrees of a commercial oven, and it will.

But there's more to consider, advised a wise man at one N-n-W. Big piles of toppings slow the center cooking. Fresh veggies like tomatoes and peppers shed water as they cook.

Crust matters, too. The Liv-N-Lite low-carb, low-cal crust is an innovation that pays off; it cooks quicker and crisper. With any crust, a pizza stone cooks the bottom quicker and more thoroughly. The truly adept can manage a pizza on an outdoor grill.

To me, these are manageable decisions and a modest price to put something of quality on the table fresh from the oven, but I claim some pizza experience. As a kid, I delighted when we made pizza from a Chef Boyardee box on babysitter nights, letting dough rise in a bowl balanced on the radiator. In semi-adult life, I made 80 pizzas a day for the all-you-can-eat pizza lunch, and tossed pizzas by hand for a Domino's rival.

Beyond technology and technique, howz da pie? Pretty good for semi-takeout. Especially the toppings, which catch us up to the late '80s. Taste the Mediterranean in feta and artichoke hearts or pig out on Hawaii with pineapple, oranges and ham. I was more impressed with the bumper crop of greens, spinach, chopped basil and cilantro, and a choice of olive oil, walnutty pesto or tomato.

In pizza, it's best to keep simple despite the temptations. They are ample here: two sausages (go for Italian, with fennel punch, over the hot), salami and pepperoni, bacon, anchovies (yeah) and chicken.

If you lust for one of these, build a simple combo around it. Don't have them all at once in the massive meat-eating, kitchen-sweeping monsters. They're difficult to cook and eat.

The best was the Aegean, a mix of pure Greek flavors - olive oil, spinach, garlic, sun-dried tomato with mozzarella and feta - ordered on the special thin crust. Chicagoans could snap it with their knuckles happily, and the heavier crust is bland.

But don't mistake me for a purist. I put a little leftover chicken and a few scraps of prosciutto on half before pushing it into the oven. Next time I'm thinking sardines. Why not?

The stores cook only small, personal-size pies because their ovens aren't large enough for real pies. Yet what I like best about Nick-N-Willy's is handing off the cooking to us.

We've got great neighborhood pizza places that make bright, crisp pies. I wish more offered half-baked pies, but so far, fewer than half of 20 I called understood the idea.

Too bad. A half-baked pie or a raw one reminds us of that big box in the kitchen, the one where you put a turkey a few tears ago.

Learn to fire that up, and you can make a world of easy pizzas on Boboli, pita, tortillas, English muffins or French bread. It won't make you as good as Mario and Maria's on the corner, but your place may smell like theirs.

212 37th Ave. N, St. Petersburg, (727) 822-1900

5145 34th St. S, St. Petersburg, (727) 867-8000

325 West Bay Drive, Largo, (727) 588-9208

80 locations around the United States, with stores planned for Brandon, Tampa and Seminole. Headquarters is in Boulder, Colo.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday through Thursday; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Details: Carryout; in-store dining with limited menu; credit cards accepted; no smoking, no alcohol.

Prices: $3.99 to $20.99

[Last modified February 1, 2006, 11:01:24]