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Photograph by Douglas Rider
Pizza Pro: Adrian Gutierrez adds toppings to one of the many pizzas he makes for Pizza My Heart in downtown Willow Glen.
Pizza My Heart delights WG with crusts, sauce
By Jim Aquino
For those unfamiliar with New York-style pizza, it's pizza with a crust as thin as a soup cracker. It's also a much more flavorful pizza, according to Bay Area pizza restaurateur Chuck Hammers.
"Because of the crust being thinner, you can taste the spice and the sauce a lot more," Hammers says. "[You're] not getting deluded by the amount of bread underneath it."
Only a few Bay Area pizzerias specialize in the thin-crust New York style. The most prominent of these pizzerias is Hammers' Pizza My Heart, which has locations in Willow Glen, Capitola, Santa Cruz, Los Gatos and Palo Alto.
Opened in 2000, the Willow Glen location is the fourth restaurant in Hammers' 20-year-old New York-style franchise (a fifth Pizza My Heart opened in Palo Alto earlier this month).
The first Pizza My Heart, in Capitola, opened in 1981. In the early '90s, the original owners sold the Capitola location to Hammers, who also owns downtown San Jose's Pizza A Go Go, which he opened in 1986. Pizza A Go Go focuses on California-style pizza, which Hammers says has "a breadier, fluffier crust."
But in terms of flavor, Hammers prefers the New York style because of its thinner, tastier crust, the result of baking the dough about 36 hours before the pizza is ordered, as well as hand-tossing it. According to Hammers, the day-old dough leads to a flavorful crust because the yeast is given more time to activate inside.
"A lot of places will make the dough that morning and they'll run it on a conveyor belt and let it rise in the shape of the pizza. It rises in a matter of an hour or two, so you really don't get the flavor," Hammers says.
According to the Willow Glen location's manager, James Reese, Pizza My Heart is the only pizzeria in the neighborhood that offers pizza by the slice. He says Pizza My Heart is made for diners who are on the go.
"You're eating within a minute after you pay," Reese says.
Customers who aren't as busy get to gaze at the surfer paraphernalia on the walls while they eat (among the doodads: a huge surfboard that's the Guinness Book of World Records title-holder for "world's largest surfboard"). They can also try two or three different pizza flavors in one visit.
According to Reese, $5.50 for two slices at Pizza My Heart is a better deal than $8 or $10 for a personal-size pie at another joint.
The Willow Glen Pizza My Heart is currently providing pizza for the $10 pizza wine tasting nights at the Grapevine wine shop, which is located across the street.
"Instead of the usual crackers and cheese sort of thing, they get hot pizza," Reese says.
Plain cheese, pepperoni and Maui are among the flavors that accompany glasses of Merlot and Cabernet during the wine nights, which take place every few Thursdays. Reese says that the wine shop asked him to make the toppings simpler so that people would be able to taste the wine.
Hammers prefers to drink zinfandel with his pizza.
"It's a bolder wine that goes with the flavor of our sauce really well," Hammers says.
Pizza My Heart receives lots of accolades from newspapers and food review websites in the Central Coast and the South Bay. But what do people from the Big Apple itself think of Pizza My Heart?
"I have a dozen or so customers from New York who come here," Reese says. "They rave that this is the closest thing they've ever gotten to New York-style pizza outside of New York. That's the most flattering compliment I can get."
Pizza My Heart, 1396 Lincoln Ave. Open every day, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. For deliveries or more information, call 408. 279.4441.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
