Just a couple of weeks ago, a new pizza place opened in Culver City called Wildcraft. Their schtick is the use of sourdough in their pizzas, which is cool with me, but I’m not sure if it entirely qualifies as being wild. Nonetheless, I was eager to try it out and see just how wild and crafty it would be.
We started with an appetizer of their Meatballs. Made with a blend of beef and pork, these unkosher balls were served in a “tomato gravy” and topped with grana padano cheese. The so-called gravy was really just a marinara sauce and quite good. Also good were the balls themselves, having a great texture, flavor and moisture level.
For my pizza, I decided to get a little wild and ordered one called Carnage. This pizza wasn’t symbiotic (that’s for you, Spider-Man fans) and instead came with porchetta, house pepperoni, pancetta, fennel sausage. It was a cacophony of meat, plus provolone and scamorza cheese. Carnage was in the “Red” section of the pizza menu, meaning it came with tomato sauce and communism, as opposed to the “White” section, which I assume came with a vitamin D deficiency.
The result of this mix of assorted cured pig meats, cheese, sauce and dough was quite delightful. I enjoyed the sourdough, which added an interesting twist to the pizza, and I loved that each slice had to be folded in order to be eaten because of the shear weight of meat. In addition, I appreciated the use of provolone and scamorza cheeses instead of the typical mozzarella. This helped give the pizza an additional complexity of flavor that regular mozzarella doesn’t usually offer.
The only trouble with the pizza was the price tag. Yeah, I know it was good, but $16 for my Carnage $8 for the Meatballs means Wildcraft won’t exactly be a go-to pizza place if I want to preserve my savings account. Despite this, it is certainly worth checking out and I couldn’t be happier to have an upscale pizza place like this in my neighborhood.
