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Maybe Faraci’s is for you, but it’s not for me

I am not the first one to say this–not by a long shot–but not being from St. Louis I have always been incredibly under whelmed by St. Louis style pizza. The way the provel melts into the sauce leaving it oozy and weeping is, to me, completely unappetizing–bordering on disgusting–even by comparison to the rubbery mozzarella other pizza places pawn off as real mozzarella.

However, I will confess, that every so often, one of the mom and pop places will throw a ripple into my hatred, and more often than not, it’s because the crust is homemade, and done so well that the thin crust is beautifully browned and crisp and accounts for a large portion of the pizza’s overall flavor.

Pirrone’s in Florissant is one of these places. I was first drug there during college on a route so convoluted that I never had any idea where it was until I happened upon it after moving to Florissant. Rolled out by hand their crust is so crisp and flavorful that it stands up to the sog-inducing goo of the provel-pizza sauce one-two, and it has a really distinctive grainy flavor that completely makes the pizza.

But it’s not Pirrone’s I’m here to talk about.

If you’re a runner you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about, and if you’re not, I’m about to inform you.
When you run great distances you get tired of running the same routes over and over again. The Garmin running GPS is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to runners because it gave us the ability to just run–run in any direction we want–without a care in the world as to where it is we’re running for in the end we will always know approximately how far we’ve gone.

Because of this, I’ve probably run on almost every street within a 5 mile radius of my home, and on some of those runs I’ve discovered places like the now gone Papagallo’s Greek restaurant. It’s slim pickings in Florissant and we went there often because they had the best baklava I’ve ever had, and they even put pastitsio on the menu specifically for Ellie.

Another I found was Roberto’s. During summer, deep in the midst of tossing Friday and Saturday night pizzas, the cooks will sometimes have the back door swung open to offer some relief to the inferno of deck ovens on high. When the winds are just right, from a quarter mile away the smell is so enticing you can’t help but think something magical is happening inside.

And here’s the point…

One day I realized if I meandered from home over to Florissant Road, it was a perfect 15 mile run if I ran to UMSL and back. So for about the last year, each time I need a long run and don’t have time to start someplace other than home, I’ve used this route. Doing so I’ve run by a handful of restaurants that visually looked worth checking out like Cosa Dolce bakery. But better still, some had such a wonderful scent they would completely ruin the second half of my run by making it miserable because I was so damned hungry.

Faraci’s was one of the latter, and Friday we finally got in the car and drove over to Ferguson to have a taste for ourselves. In a word, it was terrible. I apologize in advance if you actually love Faraci’s because, from what I gather online, there is apparently a group of people that think this is the finest St. Louis style pizza there is.

Personally, their bland pizza sauce tasted like nothing more than thinned out tomato paste. Coupled with the oozing provel, it turned the crust into something that resembled–not to mention tasted like–wet soggy cardboard; which threw me because visually it had an airy saltine quality to it (though minus the salt) that left me thinking it would be flaky and crisp.

And the salad, it made the pizza look wonderful. Even by iceberg standards it was atrociously bad as the house vinaigrette was more of a house vegetable oil.

But here’s the thing that really freaked me out: I am fully aware that sanitary and dirty are two different words. So while Faraci’s is a bit on the dingy side, it doesn’t mean the place is necessarily unsanitary. However, when the owner is smoking at a table in the restaurant and proceeds to walk into the kitchen cigarette in hand, it does not instill confidence in any way–not to mention the cook smoking at the table one minute and making pizza thirty seconds later.

We will definitely not be going back, and this is too bad, I thought I’d found a hidden gem in my neck of the woods.

The count remains at four (places worth eating at in the Florissant area).

Categories: restaurants, reviews

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