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.