Ruth Gresser - Owner-chef of Pizza Paradiso

For a pizza pioneer, a P Street paradise 

Ruth Gresser, owner and executive chef of Pizzeria Paradiso, set herself a clear goal when she opened first one, then a second, restaurant. She wanted to demonstrate the distinct difference between the kind of Italian pizza she cooks and the American variety.

The classically trained chef has worked in the kitchens of several high-end establishments. Key were the late Jean-Louis Palladin’s restaurant at the Watergate and Obelisk, which she helped launch. And like her other products, she takes her pizza seriously.

“The way I like to think of our pizzas is with the dough and the crust being the primary part or element of the pizza. The toppings are really an adornment, rather than the American version where the crust is just a vehicle for all the stuff,” she says.

This doesn’t mean her pizzas are austere. One of her top sellers is the Bosca, which comes with tomatoes, mushrooms, spinach, red onion and mozzarella. Agood many of her customers like to make a base of her Paradiso or Margherita pizzas, which carry simply tomato and mozzarella or tomato, mozzarella and basil, then add to them any number of the 32 toppings she offers.

There’s even bottarga, the salty Sicilian specialty of dried and compressed grey mullet roe that is cut in fine shavings, much like parmesan off the block. She doesn’t sell too much of that, but she likes to have it on the menu for those who want to expand their palates. And she offers two kinds of mozzarella for aficionados — the regular cow’s milk variety and the superior buffalo milk mozzarella. For all this care and attention, she gets positive feedback.

“I hear a genuine response. A lot of people say, I was just in Italy and this pizza is so much better! I don’t know about that,” she says modestly. But clearly she’s pleased.

The pies are cooked on a wood-burning stove that back in 1991, when the first Pizzeria Paradiso opened, was as new to her as it was to some of her customers. “I’d been to Italy, but I’d never worked this kind of oven. Cities [restaurant, now closed,] on 18th Street had a wood-burning oven to do a few pizzas. So I worked there two months just to learn the oven.”

“You can’t not pay attention to a wood-burning oven,” she says. “It always needs attending to. You are constantly turning the pizza so it cooks all round. You have to watch how the wood is burning and when is the right time to put more wood on.”

Gresser lets the ovens at both restaurants die down overnight. But she still needs a fresh delivery of wood to feed them once a week, three-fourths of a cord at the P Street branch and more at the larger Georgetown Pizzeria Paradiso.

In the very beginning, Gresser says, when the original pizzeria was launched, diners weren’t entirely sure what she was doing. People didn’t understand the concept of a genuine Italian pizza, she says, or why it would come with a higher price. That’s no longer the case. They line up on the steps down to P Street in front of the small Dupont Circle restaurant, which has seats for only 35. So four years ago, she opened the Georgetown branch, which, even with its places for 110, is packed.

Gresser was born in Baltimore into a family of five other kids. Her mother, she says, was mostly a home cook, but did some catering on the side. As a child, Gresser loved to cook. But she went to Grinnell College in Iowa expecting to be a chemist. “I remember my mother telling me as a teenager there was a lot of chemistry in cooking. That there was a lot of mixing things together, creating things.”

It hadn’t occurred to her that she could study cooking as a serious subject. But she began to consider the possibility her second year of school with the initiation of the organic chemistry course.

“It started when a lab I worked in had that weird chemistry smell and I realized, I really don’t like being here.” She began to consider the idea of transferring chemistry into something that smelled better. Nevertheless she completed college in the subject.

“But talking with friends, one of the things I said was, if I was doing what I wanted to do, I would be a chef. And they said, ‘Why don’t you do that?’ So I started thinking in that direction.”

She had cooked through college. Her first job was in a McDonald’s, working in the kitchen. “It was pretty unusual in 1975 to have girls in the kitchen,” she says.

When she graduated, she went to San Francisco where she found full-time restaurant work. But in 1986, she decided to move to New Hampshire to study classic and contemporary French cuisine at the culinary school of Madeleine Kamman, a French woman who had arrived in the States in 1960. On completion, she came back to Washington and began her route through some of the capital’s top restaurants.

“A little bit by chance, I’ve cooked in full service from cool neighborhood restaurants to some higher-end places,” she says. And after a while in those higher-end kitchens, she says, she wanted to do something serious with pizza.

Now that her two spots hum along more smoothly, she can take a little time off from the all-day, every-day schedule to spend time at home in Takoma Park. “At this point, I have a very loyal and competent and gifted staff,” she says.

Pizzeria Paradiso (202-223-1245; http://www.eatyourpizza.com) is located at 2029 P St. NW and 3282 M St. NW. Eight-inch pizzs cost $9.50 to $10.95, and 12-inch pizzas cost $14.95 to $16.95.
  

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the NorthWest Current newspaper. Photo Bill Petros/The Current