Pizza Without Any Parallel?

Parallel Pizzeria

34255 Pacific Coast Highway Suite 101

Dana Point, CA 92629

It used to be that I had a rule that I would wait until a restaurant was around for a year before I would review it. My reason for this was that I did not want a website full of reviews that were of boarded-up restaurants. There's that stat that still floats around about 90 percent of restaurants failing to make it to their one year anniversary before closing up shop. Now coming up on my ninth year of writing this restaurant review site, inevitably there are a good number of restaurants that I have been to that have gone the way of drive-in theaters, rotary phones, and record stores, (I know I'm definitely dating myself with these references). I realized this was a silly rule because most of you want to know if you should eat at that new place in town. Well if that new place in town you are wondering about is Parallel Pizzeria, the answer is yes, you should head there right away.

I had a sneaky suspicion that Parallel Pizzeria was going to be great when I heard who was behind it. Chef Ryan Adams of the vaunted 370 Common in Laguna Beach, and the soon to be very busy Buttermilk Fried Chicken in Downtown Orange, along with his business partner, James Nunn opened Parallel late last month. Situated in The Row Shopping Strip, this is a homecoming of sorts for Chef Adams. He used to skate and surf in this area when he was younger, and always lamented the fact that there were no good pizza places in Dana Point. He decided to rectify that by bringing Parallel to town.

To say that New Haven style pizza is under-represented here in OC would be an understatement. I did some quick research and found out that this is the only place serving New Haven style pizza in the entire county. I could have overlooked a spot, and I'm sure someone will correct me if that is the case. New Haven pizza is distinctive in that its shape is oblong, instead of round, the dough is fermented for 72 hours, the pizza is cooked in a charcoal oven at 700 degrees, and they even did some water analysis with some help from the guys at UCI to get the water as close to Connecticut's as possible. A lot of work went into this restaurant.

Thankfully this is not a build your own pizza concept, which is refreshing for a change. Haven't we reached our saturation point with the build your own pizza places? The menu here is broken up into a small selection of starters, salads, and sandwiches. There are eight signature pies to choose from, and a red and white base model that you can customize with an added upcharge per topping. These are not single serving sizes of pizzas either. They offer medium and large on most pizzas, and the medium could serve two for sure. They also serve a gluten-free cauliflower crust for people that are into that sort of thing, like my fantastic sister in law Emily. Enough build up, let's see how we liked this new pizza place in town.

I've been on a real meatball kick lately and had to give these Housemade Meatballs ($7.95) a spin. These smaller than I imagined meatballs came five to an order, were bathed in a tangy red sauce and dusted lightly with parmesan cheese. The meatballs were fork tender, with a pleasant texture to them. I loved the marinara sauce, as it was not too acidic and had a slight sweetness to it. After devouring these in record time, it made me look forward to trying their meatball sandwich on my next visit.

The medium version of this Chopped Salad was the perfect size for sharing. Chopped iceberg lettuce is jazzed up with radicchio, sliced salami, tomato, artichoke, mozzarella, onion, olives, garbanzo beans, and is then rounded out with a red wine vinaigrette. The freshness of this salad cannot be debated, and I liked that they added lots of items in this. I was not thrilled with the dressing on this though. It had a tanginess that I thought was a tad too strong for my palette, but Katie seemed to love it. I'm much more of a creamy salad dressing kind of guy.

Now the real reason you come here, the pizzas. Katie got the White and Green Pizza ($18.95) for her maiden visit to Parallel. This pizza is topped with prosciutto, ricotta, a very well done cilantro pesto, chili flakes, garlic, parmesan, and plenty of arugula perched on top of this. Katie felt this was a very flavorful pizza, and with the absence of sauce, it allowed the wonderful toppings to be the star of the show. The chili flake added a tinge of spice, while the very good prosciutto and creamy ricotta added a nice textural element. I had imagined this was going to be a dry pizza, but that was not the case. A very clean tasting pizza and a great first impression of New Haven style pizza for us.

I came here knowing that I would be having this Clam Pizza ($22.95). I know it might seem a little crazy to most of you, but clams on a pizza is pretty much a tradition in New Haven, Connecticut, so since this would be my first time experiencing this type of pizza, I thought I might as well go all in. The little neck clams are joined on the pizza by cuts of bacon, pecorino cheese, red onions, olive oil, and chili flakes. If you are averse to clams on pizza, I have to be honest and say that they were not fishy or slimy like you might expect. The sliced bacon and the spicy chili flakes kind of overshadowed the clams, which were a little hard to pick out while I was eating this. New Haven pizza is very light on the cheese and sauce, but the crust was very good on this and I definitely do not consider myself a crust guy at all. A very light pizza, which in turn did not make me feel as heavy as I only ate half of this, and saved the rest for dinner the next evening. The very good bacon used here made me excited to give their carnivore pizza a try next time.

I'm very happy for the people of Dana Point to have a great option for pizza in their town. Since this was our first foray into New Haven style pizza, I really don't have anything else to compare it to, but I liked what I had on this evening. The pizzas were lighter than the heavy deep-dish style of Chicago, not as greasy as New York style thin crust, and had more flavor than Neapolitan style pizzas. I guess you can say that the New Haven type of pizza is comfortably right in the middle ground of pizza. A sweet spot if you will. Since Parallel has only been open for only a month I look forward to seeing how it's received by the community and how it evolves. We had the pleasure of running into Chef Ryan Adams during our visit, and his passion for the culinary landscape of Orange County is contagious and very optimistic, which is something that I like to hear. Plus, he's one of the most down to earth chef/owners we have met in the nine years of writing this restaurant review blog. I'm glad I decided to break my rule of waiting a year to review a restaurant, even though I have no doubt this one will be around way longer than that.

Out of five lollipops, (because New Haven not only was the birthplace for the first hamburger, submarine, and corkscrew but the lollipop was invented in this town in 1892 as well), five being best to zero being worst, Parallel Pizzeria gets 3.5 lollipops.

Parallel Pizzeria has a very limited website, which will hopefully be updated soon. You can see it here: http://parallelpizzeria.com/