About our legendary wood burning pizza oven...

Our 800° Wood Burning Pizza Oven

Unique to restaurants in the St. Louis area, we bake our creations in a Mugnaini wood burning pizza oven, for authentic Old World Italian baking. The oven can get as hot as 900° at times, though we try to keep it at a roaring 800° for the best possible results. We use real hardwood logs to add a deep woody flavor in our foods.

Taming this wood burning pizza oven took a lot of training and refining our skills, since it takes only 90 seconds to bake the perfect pizza…and just a few more seconds to burn it! Pizzas don't just pop in the oven, bake and come out done. The blaze is on one side of the oven, and the food is on the other. Every pizza has to be rotated during its brief time in the intense heat to ensure even doneness. (In the beginning, before we mastered the art of the wood burning pizza oven, before the delicate timing became second nature, many pizzas were blackened and had to be discarded!)

The blaze of the oven leaves a signature mark on many pizzas — a charred bubble in the crust. This is not a sign of a burnt pizza (we'd never serve one that wasn't perfect!) It happens when a bubble rises out of the crust, gets closer to the heat and flames, and blackens. Many customers find the charred bubbles to be delicious — and fun to pop!

You may wonder how the chefs and other food preparers don't swelter working next to an open 800° wood burning pizza oven. That's because the oven is so incredibly well insulated, the heat stays inside.

The oven never stops. At night, the mouth of the oven is shut off with a form-fitting door to slow the burning of the wood inside. It may cool off overnight to around 300° before being fired up for the next business day.

Enjoy one of the St. Louis area's best restaurants — in Edwardsville, IL.

Introducing Peel's - St. Louis Best Italian Pizza

Enjoy unique gourmet wood fired pizzas baked in a real 800° wood burning oven. Our pizzas, sandwiches, pastas and wings are all made fresh from scratch and fired in our oven for an amazing taste and texture. Our gourmet pizzas are even better with our extensive selection of craft beers or fine wines.
View our selection of gourmet wood fired pizzas.

Riverfront Times 2012 Best of
St. Louis (Thin Crust) Pizza Winner

Peel Wood Fired Named Editorials Choice for Best (Thin Crust) Pizza for 2012

Brandon Case and Patrick Thirion, Chef-Owners of Peel Wood Fired Pizza in Edwardsville, Illinois are thrilled to announce that Peel has been named Best (Thin Crust) pizza by The Riverfront Times. You don't have to look very hard to find the secret to Peel Wood Fired Pizza's success. Really, you don't have to look at all. It's right there in the center of the kitchen, visible throughout the restaurant: the oven, which reaches temperatures of about 800 degrees, fueled by hardwood logs. This intense heat gives Peel's pies a gorgeous, gently blistered crust, its flavor lightly imbued with smoke, and it reduces the slabs of fresh mozzarella on the margherita pizza to beautifully molten puddles.

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Peel Wood Fired Pizza was the 2012 Special Editors choice in St. Louis Magazine
Peel was chosen by St. Louis Magazines Main Editor, George Mahe, for the $$ category in the 2012 Best Restaurant Issue.

"Everything that Peel does—wood fired pizza, salads, sandwiches, wings, a ton of craft beers—it does so well that it doesn’t matter that the place is 45 minutes away. Still not convinced? Get in the car, I’ll drive."

-- George Mahe
 

A special thanks to ALL of our customers for sharing meals at Peel with your family & friends. We truly appreciate your business!