Grimaldi’s Coal Brick-Oven Pizzeria

How good can a pizza be (which also translates to: how much better than other pizzas)?

Exceptionally good, especially if it's topped by high-quality, interesting ingredients and a sauce whose creator knows the value of extra soul as opposed to just extra salt, and if it's cooked at a sufficiently high temperature.

How bad can service in a pizza place be? Well, we're not talking F territory here or even D. But just because it's a pizza place doesn't mean customers don't deserve the same attention to detail and dedication to quality that they'd find anywhere else in the middle spectrum of the restaurant world. But more on that later.

Grimaldi's Coal Brick-Oven Pizzeria states in its promotional materials that it's a descendant of a pizzeria in New York that was the birthplace of pizza in this country, but its current locations all seem to be clustered in the Southwest. No matter; it's the carrying-on of the pizza-making tradition that matters, and here Grimaldi's seems to have succeeded.

The pizzeria's menu maintains that those way-back-when N.Y. pizzas were cooked with coal "because it gave the pizza a unique flavor and a crisp crust that is just not possible from gas, convection or wood ovens." We could debate that one all day, but historians say those long-ago pizzaolos cooked with coal mainly because it was cheap and readily available, and somehow the lingering waft of woodsmoke is way more appealing than a similar vestige of coal, but maybe it's just me. I do, however, appreciate that in a coal-fired oven, the heat is particularly high so the crust gets nice and crisp on the exterior without losing that give-and-take, fight-back elasticity that's so appealing, so we'll call it a split decision.

Speaking of splits: Our party of four was divided into conservative and out-there camps, so we ended up with two small pizzas (16 inches are $13; 12-inch personals are $9, while 18-inch larges are $15). For toppings, the red-state types chose mushrooms and Italian sausage ($2 each), while the blue camp got creative with meatballs ($2), sun-dried tomatoes ($4) and pesto ($2) -- yes, on tomato sauce.

So how'd they measure up? Quite well; this probably is my second-favorite pizza in Las Vegas (and no, I won't tell you the first). The sausage was nice big slices so we could really taste it instead of those little crumbles that are on the stuff they bring in at the office, and the mushrooms were lightly cooked, retaining lots of texture.

I didn't think we'd be able to really taste the pesto on the blue-state pizza, but sure enough, it was sufficiently assertive to poke its head up above the sea of red, and the concentrated flavor and chewy texture of the sun-dried tomatoes and milder, meaty flavor and texture of the meatballs ended up working nicely.

We also had a small Caesar salad ($6; large is $9) and a small antipasto ($8; large is $12), and just as was the case with the pizzas, "small" wasn't. The Caesar was an exceptionally nice rendition with a particularly creamy dressing, crunchy-crisp romaine and a truly generous amount of shaved Parmesan. The antipasto was a platter bearing slices of fresh mozzarella plus olives, rolled salami, roasted red peppers and some bread, with olive oil and balsamic on the side for dressing as we saw fit.

We all shared a cannoli ($4.50) -- also known as "Grimaldi's Famous Cannoli" -- for dessert, and it was the rich-creamy-stuffed-with-chocolate variety, which is to say we liked it.

We liked the atmosphere, too -- especially the bar area that's open to the air that seems so fresh at this time of year -- but we weren't particularly fond of the service. Our waitress didn't seem to care that we had to ask her three times for lemon wedges for our water, and the runners didn't seem to mind that we hadn't finished our salads before the pizza arrived or that there was no room on our small table for all that food. Our waitress did rise to the occasion toward the end, when she took our boxed-up leftover slices and put the box on another table to get it out of our way.

But by then we already knew: For the pizza, we'll be back. For the service, not so much.

Las Vegas Review-Journal reviews are done anonymously at Review-Journal expense. Contact Heidi Knapp Rinella at 383-0474 or e-mail her at hrinella@ reviewjournal.com.