This Father's Day was a three-day weekend for me and my paternal dining companion, who managed to be the first of two regular dining companions to take me to this "hot" classy pizza joint, "burning" with anticipation to try it despite the apparently spectacular cacio e pepe having disappeared from the menu in less time than Ozzy Osbourne spends sober. A record we were not too averse to challenging by first ordering a Saint Arnold brew from Nobi next door, which thanks to the ownership being shared by both establishments, is the only restaurant I've found in Houston where you can say to a waitress you're going to eat somewhere else and not get that same dirty look a woman shoots at her husband's secretary. The same inventive fusion of one popular cuisine with Houston's own original culinary style that has made Nobi a budget casual and hip hangout, takes a slightly more upmarket spin in Hyde Park's imperfect but still alluring mixture of Italian class and high-quality ingredients, and New American heartland homeliness.
Our server was quickly responsive and eager to show off the wine list, packed tightly into one page of 8-point font like that one-page cheat sheet allowed on your physics final. We decided to eschew any additional alcohol until our brains thought clearly enough to decide between the Berkshire pork belly, wild boar meatball, and charcuterie plate - and thanks to our server happening to have a completed plate to kindly bring by and show us on its way to being devoured elsewhere, we chose to spend the $15 on the latter, hoping it would complement one of the wood-fired pizzas well. The double whammy of salamis and a spicy red sausage, not as unctuously fiery as Calabrian nduja but maybe similar, was nicely cut by the crisp pickled carrots and the finest asparagus I've ever eaten in my life, the simple vinegar pickling accentuating its herbal qualities while eliminating any trace of the slime I tend to despise about this vegetable. Castelvetrano olives and a pungent but seemingly out-of-place Germanic-style beer mustard added extra saline punches to this decently crafted but rather messy plate that, admittedly, I'd probably pass on next time in favor of the meatball.
By the time the thick-crusted "Nice to Meat Ya" pizza with edges blacker than a rapper's convention strutted out on a glistening pan, we decided we were ready to pair it with some sparkling red wine, our server offering us a taste of the Denny Bini Lambrusco and then pouring us glasses for merely $5 each. We told the charcuterie plate "we'll be back after these messages," striking the pizza while the iron was hot, and found the delicious assortment of premium meats like not too salty- or cheap-tasting pepperoni and a sharp and meaty wild boar sausage anything but "boar"ing. Sadly, despite requests for less sauce, the dough itself wasn't fully cooked through enough to be crispy, the pizza quickly becoming as yielding as a contortionist skeleton. Perhaps the menu ought to sport a yellow-and-black-attack 24-point font sticker for the $5 burrata cheese add-on option: "OVERSIZE LOAD." But cooking it any further to crisp up the middle might make the currently deliciously charcoaled edges taste like the remains of a Yule log, easily overwhelming even the vibrant Lambrusco that proved welcomingly refreshing against the heavy, bold pizza flavors and soothing against the sour pickled vegetables. So I guess I can settle for "Missed it by that much" in my quest to find the greatest pizza outside of my 3-hour stay in Italy long ago.
The high-mounted tables with not-too-blocky black chairs can feel somewhat uncomfortable in a finer dining establishment, but the payoff in the overlook of the cozy interior with a fine view of the wine gallery is certainly a means of getting money into Hyde Park's coffers. Though the free entertainment in the back corner, a foosball and shuffleboard table, more than sufficed to spend the rest of the inaugural Father's Day weekend sobering up together. Following 6 accidental grabs of the other team's foosball player handles, 1 throw of the other player's shuffleboard weight, and 0 drunk accidental departures out the side door as our $40 check waited for Godot on the empty table, we were ready to go home.
While Hyde Park is refreshingly free of pretension and flashiness, and is a welcomed entry in the wood-fired pizza oven market as it's occupied at the lower end only by chains like Russo's, its execution is still imperfect and did not tremendously impress my dining companion, besides the terrific sausage. I certainly would like to return in the future to try more of the creative appetizers and see if some of the other pizzas or a "Nice to Meat Yagain" are closer to the elusive Santo Graal, but I hope they can hit the ball "out of the park" next time to compete with some of the stellar budget eateries like Atitlán, The Cuban Flavor, and Kasra nearby - and Nobi itself. read more