R.I.P., Casa Bianca Co-Founder

(Pic via AAA's website.)

When my parents come to town, as they did last weekend, they have a handful of favorite eateries we have to visit. In-N-Out Burger, of course. More recently, they added Langer's to the list, after I introduced them to the best Pastrami this side of the Mississippi (and possibly all of the country). Then there's Casa Bianca.

Ahh, that pizza. Since we first brought them there a few years ago, it's been a mandatory stop on the Schneider Eating Tour of Los Angeles. That sausage, that thin crust... yes, friends, it's worth the wait. And you're gonna wait for a table.

I bring all this up because, as others have mentioned, Casa Bianca co-founder Sam Martorana has passed away. He was 83. Martorana opened Casa Bianca with his brother, Joe, in 1955.

If you're still not sold on the "best pizza in L.A." claim, L.A.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold also calls Casa Bianca the city's top pie; in a 1991 review (reprinted on Casa Bianca's site), Gold raves:

the pizza is just the best, especially the sausage pizza: speckled with sweetly spiced homemade sausage, shot through with mellow cloves of roasted garlic (if you order them) and topped with plenty of the kind of Mozzarella cheese that forms something as tangly as the cords on an old fashioned telephone switch-board when everybody has taken his or her slice.

Tomato sauce is sparingly applied, a bit of tartness to cut through the richness of the cheese and the sausage (the eggplant topping, lightly breaded, is pretty good too); the cheese and sauce reach nearly to the edge of the crust, which lets you avoid the touchy problem of what to do with all those leftover pizza edges. The crust is chewy, yet crisp enough to maintain rigidity while you maneuver it toward your mouth; thin, yet thick enough to give the sensation of real, developed wheat flavor, and with enough carbony, bubbly burnt bits of to make each bite slightly different from the last. And any leftovers taste superb with morning coffee.

The L.A. Times has an obit here, noting that Martorana continued to make the famous Casa Bianca sausage until recently.

Check out our Rate-A-Restaurant review here.