I’ve been meaning to make a larger thread about my favorite restaurants in the Greater and Extremely Greater Nashua Area, but I have a sprained wrist/broken hand. Worth bringing attention to La Fiamma, a pizza joint in soft opening right now, though. After seeing a lot of noise about them on Facebook, we drove up there yesterday, and man … I think this place is going to be very busy once everyone discovers them. (I also thought that of Crush in Nashua, though, 10–15 years ago. But that was a bad location, and pizza that suffers from delivery as much as Neapolitan style does is probably a tougher thing to make work financially.)
The soft opening menu is limited to a handful of specialty pizzas and I’m not sure if you can add toppings; we didn’t ask. The current pizzas are a mix of traditional and less traditional pizzas; I’d be happy to try any of them, though I wish the pepperoni didn’t come with hot honey by default (I just find it boring, and sweet pizza gives me flashbacks to birthday parties at Shakey’s). At the moment, Sunday is the only day they do lunch. It’s a small space: I think four tables and the bar.
We ordered the Spicy Sporkie and the Mortazza. The former is sausage, ricotta, and pickled cherry peppers, with the usual San Marzano tomatoes and mozzarella; the Mort is a white pizza of some kind with burrata, mortadella, and pistachios (the burrata made it hard for me to tell if it’s a white pizza in the garlic-and-oil sense or the cream sauce since). Both were excellent, and I’ll order both again. The mortadella/burrata/pistachio thing is one of those combinations that’s becoming easier to find and less novel, but you know what, I’m not remotely sick of it yet. The sausage on the sporkie could maybe hit a little harder, be a little punchier, but I’m picking nits. This is probably the best pizza I’ve had in New Hampshire as an adult. (I don’t know if it’s physically possible to enjoy any pizza as an adult as much as you did at 16.)
You can see there’s some good char on the crust. What you can’t tell in a photo is that despite that, the cornicione is very soft and puffy. I don’t know if this is considered Neapolitan style—it’s not soft or wet at the center—but it’s clearly in that family. Good flavor to the dough without it distracting from any other elements. I should’ve been more careful reheating the leftovers for dinner, because five minutes in the oven was enough to make that soft cornicione crunchy.
This is an hour’s drive for me, and while most of my favorite pizza places are closer (Stromboli’s in Billerica, Frank Pepe’s in Burlington [my mother’s from New Haven], C&S in Pepperell [my local pizza growing up in the 80s]), I’ll definitely make the drive again. I know any mention of New England pizza must by law be responded to by someone saying it’s not as good as New York, but listen: I spent 15 years in New Orleans and Indiana. Appreciate your pizza. You don’t know what it’s like out there.
I don’t know anything about the folks running the place. Someone on Facebook said it’s the same owner as Kashmir in Salem NH, and that this is why they have a Chicken Tikka pizza, but I’ve never been to Kashmir. I’m probably getting that pizza next time, though.
