We The Pizza
 Washington D.C.      Date of Visit  04/19/17        http://wethepizza.com

After enjoying so much of the D.C. traffic on the way in, our plan to try some Laotian cuisine at Thip Khao began to waiver. Then we remembered the two all American outposts of Top Chef contestant Spike Mendelsohn were just over a half mile walk from our hotel, so we hoofed it and decided on pizza instead of burgers. We The Pizza is loud and hopping with slices and pies landing on the tables and headed out the doors.
 

Many Pies Await
 

The service is a little confusing for first timers but the staff is friendly amidst all of their energy. The 70’s and 80’s blast out of the speakers while people toss dough, jerk sodas (much more on that in a minute), and reheat individual slices in the deck oven ala the style of NY. One of the cooks(?), bakers(?), pizzaiolo(?) stepped out front to refill his beverage from the fountain and stopped to pick up a couple small pieces of trash and tidy some other things up without attention or fanfare. Certainly didn’t seem like it was “his job” but in good places it’s everyone’s job.

The food, is it really something you would expect from kitchen celebrity? We ordered wings, slices and a full pie to take back to our hotel room, which happened to have a huge fridge. The wings were sriracha hot and honey sweet and ran much more to the sweet than the pepper, they were also baked instead of dunked but were functional.
 

The pizzas slices all had an outstanding foundation of thin and crispy crust which gets just close enough to cracker to add texture and support toppings without leaving the realm of crust. It’s spectacular and out of the oven the slices have wee bursting bubbles of some kind of fat clinging to the bottom and boosting the crispitude. Downside, I think they rushed our whole pie by just a smidge and the crust didn’t quite make it into the hall of Valhalla the way the slices did.

As far as varieties, the only one I didn’t really care for was Colletti’s Notorious BBQ Pie with pulled pork, sauce, cheddar and crispy onions. There were so many onions Jimmy Hoffa could have been under there. If the sauce is indeed award winning, it certainly wasn’t for topping this pizza unless the award is for Q sauce least likely to fight its way through a pile of onion straws.
 

Realistically, it seemed the more there was on the pizza the less I enjoyed it; this is NOT the Tao of Tom. Pile it up, then add another handful, this is typically my way. The antithesis to the Big Apple and the Boot. I understood it here. Less can simply be more. The Cajun Chicken and Andouille was fine with the onions and seasoning but again was not going to compete with the clean and beautiful. The Honey Ham and Pineapple was much better than the last few pig fruit pizza’s I’ve had, tangy fruity sweetness and salty Virginia ham brought noticeable quality to the slice.
 

Our whole round disc was the Forest Shroomin’ Pie with shrooms, mozzarella, parmesan, and thyme. Earthy fungus freak-out, so much mushroom flavor with both silky and salty cheese…excellent…beside the just under crust that is…oh…and compared to the single slice I wished we had ordered as a whole…the Artisanal Four Cheese. So simple, that stupid crust, thin spread of tomato sauce, and then: melty earthy, shroomy, Fontina; smoky, nutty, butterscotch, smoked Gouda;  lightly spicy and salty Asiago; and the King of salty nuttiness, Parmesan. That’s it. And That’s IT!

If I ever scoffed when I heard Spike had opened a burger and pizza joint after Top Chef, I actually can’t remember, that single slice condemns me. Not everything else was as successful but this was a masterpiece.
 

While the pizza was good, I expected it to be. I did not expect the list of Sodas to be what they were, which was extraordinary. Made by hand with real chunks of whatever goes into them…so freaking good. The long strips of ginger gave the Don’t Forget Your Ginger Roots some real bright punch against the sweet bubbles. My first soda (that’s right, we went back and ordered two more, delicious) was the Very, Very, Sour-ry Cherry was by far my favorite and seemed to distill the very essence of sweet and sour actual, real, genuine, cherry. The second round I ordered an Egg Cream (Ubet Manhattan Egg Cream to be precise), ain’t never had one before and got something tasty but akin to a weak milkshake with chocolate…probably perfect for an egg cream, I wouldn’t know. Steph's second was Dreams Are Made of Strawberry Lemonade and was loaded with the remnants of both fruits, tart as the day is long. If you find yourself in D.C. for a slice, go simple, and don’t skip the sodas.