Dinner & a movie
May 21, 2009
Pizza Pi Vegan Pizzeria: No cheese, no meat, no problem
By Joe Darda
Photo by Rob Watters.
Pizza Pi, located on the Ave, offers delicious bruschetta bread sticks among its appetizer options.
If you’re a U-District vegan who entertains illicit desires for hot-out-of-the-oven, cheese-bubbling good pizza, then you’re living in the right neighborhood. On the corner of Northeast 55th Street and the Ave is Pizza Pi, one of only two 100 percent vegan pizzerias in the United States.
With soy cheese, faux meats and seemingly buttery crusts, Pizza Pi will make you forget you’re eating vegan. And some, the owners will tell you, don’t even know it in the first place.
“We get some customers in here that don’t realize they’re in a vegan restaurant eating a vegan pizza,” said co-owner Tami Blanchette. “It really works for everybody.”
Blanchette and her husband, Colin, were longtime Pizza Pi customers before taking over the pizzeria in December 2007. The Blanchettes, both vegan and with a combined 20-plus years of restaurant experience, immediately brought new life to the then-struggling pizzeria.
The new owners expanded the menu to include salads, open-faced sandwiches, calzones and appetizers — all vegan, of course — and opened up the dining area, adding more tables and commissioning an artist to provide paintings and a more inviting décor.
The difference is a matter of night and day.
“The atmosphere was previously very stark, not a great place to sit and eat,” Tami Blanchette said. “But my husband and I have really tried to make it a place that anyone would want to go: a destination.”
In other words, if you haven’t been to Pizza Pi in the past two years, it’s about time for another — or first — visit.
And the pizza won’t disappoint. The restaurant features more than 20 specialty options — $9, $16 and $22 by size — including the Phoni-Pepperoni, a delicious combo pizza of soy pepperoni slices, black olives, bell peppers and mushrooms piled high over a thin crust and topped with melting soy cheese.
Pizza Pi bakes all of its pizzas in a stone oven, which is conducive to its thin, Neapolitan-style crusts and makes for a quicker baking process: i.e., you eat sooner.
Perhaps the one feature that really makes the pizzeria’s pies exceptional is its generous and inventive toppings. The Thai chicken pizza, for example, puts California Pizza Kitchen to shame with a delicious medley of white garlic sauce, mushrooms, a sweet and salty peanut sauce, pineapple and faux-chicken strips.
As if this weren’t enough, Pizza Pi also offers some enticing appetizers, including a light and tasty bruschetta on white-garlic toast ($6), as well as hot sandwiches ($9), which Blanchette will tell you are a “knife-and-fork” ordeal.
Upon request, Pizza Pi will also make pizzas with gluten-free crust or rice cheese for those with food allergies. When it comes down to it, Pizza Pi really does cater to anyone and everyone — except carnivores, that is.
Reach reporter Joe Darda arts@dailyuw.com.
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