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| The Mastrolia family in front of their Newport restaurant, Bayfront Pizza: Katrina and Joe, along with their children, 3-year-old Lolita and 18-month-old Domino. “We built the restaurant right here so that we could be close to home, so that we could enjoy our kids at the same time, while being distracted by work,” Joe said. OCT photos. |
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Pizza Passions, Renewed
BAYFRONT PIZZA - NEWPORT
By Niki Price
Oregon Coast Today
Katrina and Joe Mastrolia have enjoyed many pleasant surprises since they opened Bayfront Pizza in March. The tourist traffic has been steady, the delivery clientele has been grateful and the local ice cream market has made room for their robust Italian-style gelato.
They’ve even managed to win over pizza lovers. Not just any pizza lovers, mind you, but the aficionados who love it so much that they can’t abide a substandard pie. Those folks, Joe said, have found their obsession reignited at the Mastrolia’s Newport pizzeria.
“A lot of people have given up on pizza because they just don’t like the choices that are available. They feel confined, like they have to eat just pepperoni,” he said. “We allow people the opportunity to reinvent pizza. We have seven different sauces to choose from, and you can build anything you want on top of that. I’ve had people tell me that they haven’t eaten pizza in years, but now they’re back.”
It may still take them a while to order. All the Mastrolias’ pizzas start with organic flour that’s made into a fresh dough and hand-stretched before being topped with one of six flavorful homemade sauces: tomato, pesto, creamy garlic, barbecue, olive pesto, or garlic and olive oil. The toppings list, 33 items long, includes everything from standards like pepperoni and anchovies to more exotic flavors like cilantro and Pasilla chilis.
If they’re feeling indecisive, they can always turn to the Favorite Combos menu. The most popular Bayfront Pizza specialties are the Lumberjack, which is topped with pepperoni, sausage, salami, Canadian bacon and chicken, and the Wild Mushroom, with button, Portobello, oyster and shiitake mushrooms.
“The Wild Mushroom has an olive pesto for the sauce. That’s a blend of four different olives, capers and spices, which really gets your savory glands going. It allows you to taste the mushrooms as a full-flavored meal instead of just an accent,” Joe said.
No matter what the selection, it will be assembled with care and baked in a brick pizza oven. It can be purchased by the slice, at the counter on Bay Boulevard, or delivered free to any location in Newport.
“We think you can really taste the difference when someone takes the time to work with organic flour, hand-stretch the pizzas and bake them in a brick oven. That’s what is nice about being a small shop. It allows us to take part in the quality, and to make pizza the way we like it, rather than being a franchise,” Joe said.
Bayfront Pizza may be the new restaurant on the block, but the Mastrolias are pizza pros. Before moving to Newport in 2003, they owned and operated a takeout pizza parlor in a small, tourist-driven town in rural Marin County, in north-central California. They liked the business, but when Katrina became pregnant with their first child, they began looking for a year-round, permanent community.
Today, they have two children — Lolita, age 3, and Domino, 18 months — and two businesses, Bayfront Pizza and Sea Beans, a drive-through coffee stand in Depoe Bay. In the mornings, you’ll see Joe with the children as they open up the shop; after 10 a.m., when the coffee rush is over, Katrina takes the offspring off duty. It’s a busy life, they say, but it’s pretty much what they had in mind.
“We live right in the neighborhood, and we started the business here so that we could be close to home and enjoy our kids at the same time. We know that any restaurant is a 12, 14, 16 hour job, and this way, we can embrace family life at the same time,” Joe said.
As you might guess, children are welcome at Bayfront Pizza. They’re invited to color on a clean pizza box, or to enjoy the gallery of box art that’s already posted on the wall. They sell salads, sandwiches and daily specials, along with a selection of beer, wine, espresso coffee drinks and soft drinks — something for everyone in the family.
Bayfront Pizza also offers a taste treat that can be difficult to find: gelato. This frozen Italian concoction is made with whole milk, rather than cream, and has an intense flavor that makes regular ice cream taste a little bland. It’s made by Villa Dolce, the same family-owned company that makes gelato for Wolfgang Puck’s restaurants, and comes in 14 flavors, like coconut almond fudge, pistachio, tiramisu, lemon and vanilla bean. There are even two sugar-free choices.
“We really wanted to bring gelato in here, because we love it and nobody else has it around here. It’s so much fun to educate people about it, because they’re really interested and excited, especially when they taste it. The flavors are all so intense, wonderful and fruity,” Katrina said. “Since it’s made with milk, it has fewer calories than ice cream. So you’ve got fewer calories, more flavor and smaller servings, so it’s a win all the way around.”
Eventually, Katrina hopes to make gelato herself, and incorporate all the local flavors that make Oregon’s cuisine special (marionberry gelato sounds good, doesn’t it?). They also hope to enlarge their menu and, perhaps, even their restaurant space. But for now, these pizza makers are working to maintain quality, build a trained employee base and keep their children happy.
“We just turned on the open sign, and people started coming in. The response has been awesome. It was a pleasant surprise,” Joe said. “There’s an amazing vitality on the Bayfront, with so many people coming from all over just to enjoy the coast, and it’s nice to be part of that energy. And we have such a flourishing delivery business, with repeat customers week after week. We’ve almost got the addresses memorized.”
Bayfront Pizza, 855 SW Bay Blvd., is located on the west end of Newport’s Historic Bayfront District. They’re open daily, with free delivery, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. For details, call 541-265-6622; menus and other information can be found at bayfrontpizza.com.
TideTables is an advertiser-sponsored feature of the Oregon Coast Today. To include your restaurant in an upcoming edition, call 541-921-2306.
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