A Good Prospect in Nepoletana Pizza - Story and photos by Thomas Atkins
When the idea of flat bread found its way to Italy, the city of Naples made it their own and by the 18th century, the definition of pizza was born. This first pizza, named the Margherita Pizza after Queen Margherita, has remained the same for over a hundred years thanks to Verace Pizza Napoletana, a movement whose goal is to promote and protect the name and the product of this original style of pizza and tradition found in Naples. Yet one does not have to travel to Naples to taste this unique approach to flat bread, as certified Napoletana pizzerias are slowly sprouting across the United States. Currently, in northern California, only two of these certified pizzerias exist – and one happens to be nestled beneath the pines of Twain Harte. Arriving at the quaint restaurant known as The Prospector, which opened in 2006, I met with the owner, Robert Martin, who gave me his insight into the fascinating Napoletana pizza process, the evolution of his restaurant, and his ideas on sustainability for the community.
Sierra Mountain Times (SMT): “How did you end up in Twain Harte?”
Robert Martin (RM): “Well, in August of 1978 my girlfriend at that time and I had just finished a long hitchhiking trip to the southern tip of Alaska across Canada to Minnesota and back to California. We were on our way to Tahoe looking for a job when we stopped in Columbia to camp. My girlfriend said, ‘I like it here, let’s stay’…and I said, ‘You’ve got to be joking!’ But we had been on the road a long time and it was nice to find a place to hang out for awhile. So we ended up staying and I ended up getting a job at Perkos cooking breakfast for a month until I could find something else. In October I moved to my parent’s house in Twain Harte. They lived in the shady part of town and I stayed there the first winter, and I hated it. So we got together and bought a house on the sunny side of town and I’ve lived and worked here off and on ever since.”
SMT: “What did you do between 1978 and opening up the Prospector?”
RM: “I traveled around some more and bought a house up in Montana where I lived and worked in a restaurant for awhile before moving to Texas in 1981 where I worked on an organic demonstration farm. There was a group called Natural Food Associates and they were the forerunners of the organic movement. After working there for a summer I returned to California with the intent of working at the City Hotel in Columbia; but when I applied, they said they didn’t want me until I took the culinary courses at Columbia College. So I did. Then from 1984 to 1989 I worked at Ernie’s Elderberry House in Oakhurst which was just starting then, but is pretty famous now. I basically worked in restaurants most of the time, but by the time I moved back to Twain Harte, I had decided that I would get away from the food business and my wife Ruth and I decided to open a wine bar in Twain Harte.”
SMT: “Why did you decide to choose wine over the food business?”
RM: “I’ve always done the cooking thing as a hobby, but when I took the cooking classes at the college I knew for sure that I didn’t want to cook in a restaurant – there is no money in it. I think my interest in wine grew while working on the farm in Texas. I realized that the grape industry in California was using a lot of pesticides and people were drinking concentrated forms of that in wine, and I started to learn about it. My interest had also developed while working at restaurants. I had fun walking from table to table and talking to people about wine, selling wine and tasting really great wine.”
SMT: “What happened with the wine bar idea?”
RM: “Unbeknownst to me, when I bought the I Love Pizza business in Twain Harte in 2006 I didn’t know that I couldn’t have a wine bar in this location. I found out from the ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) that I had to be a restaurant and I couldn’t be a wine bar…so I had to change my plans. In the beginning, I was shooting for the Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence and I had 175 wines on my list, but I realized it wasn’t worth it. Although I still offer wine and people can come in and pour their own glass, that isn’t my main focus anymore. My main focus is wine and food pairing.”
SMT: “How did you adapt to this change in plans?”
RM: “Once I realized that I couldn’t do the wine bar I decided to be a wine oriented restaurant. As it turned out, it worked out for me because once we started going and cooking, people started coming for the food instead of for the alcohol. I don’t think I would be in business today if I had just been a wine bar because there is no market for what I wanted to do in this town.”
SMT: “So you continued to do pizza like the previous restaurant?”
RM: “Yes, but I didn’t want to be like the former restaurant. I Love Pizza was a good pizza parlor, but it was a pizza parlor…and I wanted to be different. So I said, ‘Well, if I’m going to do pizza, I’m going to do something that is totally different and make pizza that no one else has. So I came across an organization called the VPN (Verace Pizza Napoletana), which certifies pizzerias to make authentic Naples style pizza. Once I saw that there were only 24 certified in the U.S. out of 63,000 pizzerias, I figured that would be my niche. So before I opened the restaurant I found the guy from Naples who runs the organization here in the states and I went down to his restaurant in L.A. for a seminar on how to make the dough.”
SMT: “What was the class like?”
RM: “They just throw you into the kitchen and you cook for his restaurant. It was just me in the class and they set aside a series of days for me to come and work and taught me the recipe for the dough and how to make it. On the last day I had to make it without any instructions. So I opened here in October of 2006 and practiced for seven or eight months, and then took the exam in May of 2007. For the exam the organization leader came to my restaurant and tested me with a three hour oral and practical exam. So now I am a certified member.”
SMT: “How many certified restaurants are there now?”
RM: “Now we have 38 members, but there is only one other restaurant in Northern California that is certified and it is in San Francisco.”
SMT: “How come there are so few certified restaurants?”
RM: “I asked myself the same question and wondered why people weren’t getting on board with it, so I started reading the blogs online and a lot of people call the VPN the pizza police. Basically, they don’t want anyone telling them how to make pizza. But I don’t mind. I think it’s great to uphold the tradition associated with the DOC for not just marketing but to continue the tradition and quality of Neapoletana pizza.”
SMT: “What’s the history behind the Napoletana pizza?”
RM: “The pizzaiolos in Naples believe that is where the word pizza came from. The pizza that is considered what the word pizza represents is the Margherita pizza. It is just a cheese pizza that one of the pizzaiolos made for Queen Margherita in the colors of Italy – white, green and red. People have been eating flat bread with stuff on it for thousands of years, but the word pizza started about the late 1700s. During this time the artist community in Naples were the first ones to ever get credit for food. The Napoletana pizzaiolos would allow them to eat pizza for free all week and then when they sold a piece of art they would come and pay for their pizza. The type of pizza they would eat was pretty much made with tomato, garlic, oregano and olive oil. But before olive oil, or if they didn’t have the money, they’d just put chunks of lard on it.”
SMT: “What are the rules for making Napoletana pizza?”
RM: “There is a document by the Italian government that lays out what the rules are and says if you are going to make pizza then it has to be made in a certain way. They are really strict. Basically, it’s a thin crust pizza that has very little toppings on it. Some of the things that revolve around certified pizza is that you have to make the crust according to the specifications, you have to use tomatoes and fresh mozzarella cheese, the oven temperature has to be over 800 degrees and the cooking time is 90 seconds or less.”
SMT: “Ninety seconds! Seriously?”
RM: “Yep. It’s original fast food. With the oven so hot, it cooks things fast.”
SMT: “What kind of oven do you use?”
RM: “I have an Italian wood burning oven. There are a lot of chefs out there that are taking on wood ovens these days…its becoming popular. Cooking in a wood oven gives the food a real homey feel to it and the food tastes really good.”
SMT: “How much wood do you use to keep it at 800 degrees?”
RM: “I discovered in the beginning that it was costing a cord and a half of wood a month in order to restart the fire every day, but now I have it down to a cord a month because I just keep the fire going all the time. It’s a lot easier than starting from scratch. If I let it go out and restart it – it’s the buildup period that uses up the most wood. So when I leave at night and it’s at 800 degrees, I throw a log on there, close the door, and tomorrow morning when I come in it will still be over 500 degrees. From there it doesn’t take much to bring it back to 800 degrees. I gauge how hot it is by pointing my laser thermometer inside the oven.”
SMT: “Do you only use the oven for pizzas?”
RM: “They claim you can’t cook pizza and food in the same oven because pizza requires too high a temperature, but during the first year I developed a technique of my own on how to cook food at 850 degrees…and have it come out delicious as opposed to burnt. But it took a lot of practice and I burned a lot of things because it’s a totally different style of cooking than on a stove. There is no instruction manual that says, ‘Hey, do it this way.’ The first year I hired a guy who burned a lot of stuff because he was used to being able to put stuff on the stove and walk away…but in here, you’re cooking at such a high temperature, by the time you walk away and come back, sometimes its already burnt. But I’ve been coming up with my recipes for things that can be cooked in a wood oven. Now the food thing has really taken off, and the wine part is slowly moving to the side right now because the pizza has taken the spotlight.”
SMT: “Do you do anything special to your pizza?”
RM: “I have discovered that there are little things I can do to personalize the dough – to make it my own, and still stay within the rules. But overall I have a set recipe that allows me to get a consistent product. It’s a live product so every day is a little different. Some days are better than others. When it rains its hard because it absorbs the moisture out of the air so every day you have to make it differently.”
SMT: “Do you make the dough every day?”
RM: “Yes, but I can’t give out too many trade secrets.”
SMT: What do you put on the dough?”
RM: “On this kind of pizza the dough is made from flour, water, salt and yeast and nothing else and the sauce is made from tomatoes and nothing else. So anything that flavors it is put on top instead of in the sauce like a lot of pizzerias where everything is cooked into the sauces for the flavor. I put on oregano, parmesan, olive oil, fresh mozzarella that I make, and different toppings. It’s pretty simple pizza compared to American style pizza. That style is loaded up to be a meal on a piece of bread, while this style is really meant to be more like an appetizer as opposed to a full on meal.”
SMT: “Where do you buy your products?”
RM: “I buy all high quality ingredients for my Italian pizza, so I get it from wherever I can. I go through a lot of trouble to make really high grade food and I have a lot of specialty items. I talked to a guy this morning that just started importing tomatoes that they use for the Napoletana pizza. These are DOP (Protected Denomination of Origin) tomatoes, which means they only come from where they originated. They now have a distributor in San Francisco, but they are grown on the plains of Italy between the ocean and Mount Vesuvius. Originally tomatoes came from Peru in the 16th century, but Europeans were afraid to eat them until the early 1700s because they thought they were poisonous. They were yellow at first and these DOP tomatoes developed out of those. Supposedly they are the best sauce tomatoes in the world…and I use them for the base of the red pizza. For a white pizza I just use oregano. My oregano is also expensive because I buy just the flowers – making my pizza taste a certain way. I also get water buffalo mozzarella, which is imported from Italy. It can also be found in California and New York, the only two places in the United States that have water buffalo herds. The Italians started making cheese from water buffalos in the 1600s when they first brought them from India. My parmesan is also very high grade. Just like the pizza, it is also a DOP product. Parmesan comes from Parma and there are different grades of parmesan based on how long it’s aged. Right now I have 36 month old cheese, which is a lot more expensive but tastes a lot better. It costs about $18 a pound as opposed to a five pound bag for $16 of the green-boxed Kraft kind of parmesan. I also buy whole artichokes with the stem. So to make a pizza with these high grade products it bumps up the price…but they are paying for high quality food.”
SMT: “Are you able to make any profit using such expensive products?”
RM: “The average American restaurant runs on about a 33 percent food cost…and it’s hard to make money because it doesn’t leave much for anything else. It’s cost prohibitive for a big operation to have those kinds of things but I can get away with it because I am a small business.”
SMT: “Are you able to find any of your products locally?”
RM: “I always try to buy local, organic food to support the local farmers. I’ve been really working to try to convince enough people in Twain Harte to get a community garden started that would produce fruit and vegetables. If we could get the whole community involved, I don’t think it would cost much money and it could provide food to all the restaurants in town as well as to the elementary school. I think the town, because of the nature of the population here, could really benefit from it.”
SMT: “Are there any plans for such a garden?”
RM: “The garden thing would take a lot of people to put it all together. I’ve offered to help organize it, but the three or four times I’ve presented it, no one really shows interest. But it would be awesome if we could build it up at Black Oak School: it’s flat, it’s sunny and there is irrigation. It has it all. It would benefit the community in such a big way. At the business meetings they are always struggling with ideas of how to draw people to Twain Harte and inevitably Murphys comes to mind all the time – but the attraction of Murphys is never going to be the attraction of Twain Harte. We don’t have vineyards. Having the idea that we are a wine region when we aren’t is ridiculous…but it’s not ridiculous to think that we can turn this into a sustainable community. We need to find our own identity, something that is sustainable and that will draw the kind of people that we want to have here. Yet people don’t seem to think of it as a community effort and how it could potentially benefit the community. That would be the beginning of the driving force to bring people to Twain Harte – solely for good food. It would be great to see that as the first step toward our own sustainable community. We won’t necessarily see the benefits of building a sustainable community now, but in the next generation or two this could be a spectacular location.”
SMT: “How much time do you spend preparing food at the restaurant?”
RM: “Since I spent so much time skiing and climbing in my 20s and 30s, I knew for sure I would have to work full time when I got older…which is where I am at today. I come here every day and spend all day getting things ready for the new menu, which changes every day. I make stuff I’ve done in the past and things I’ve never done before. I just figure it out and come up with different themes.”
SMT: “You have themed meals?”
RM: “Yes. The first one was on Valentine’s Day after the restaurant had opened because I wanted to let people know that we were so much more than just a pizza parlor. So one night I told some people in the dining room that I was going to do a ten course Italian dinner for Valentines Day at $100 a person just to see if I could do it. In four days I sold 22 seats and I realized that this would make a difference and would start changing people’s perspectives on the restaurant…and it did. After this I changed the name to the Prospector so people would leave behind the pizza parlor mentality.”
SMT: “What other themes have you done?”
RM: “I do a lot of different dinners. I’ve done wine dinners and different ethnic dinners. One of my favorite dinners was a pre-Hispanic dinner. I bought a book in Mexico City that had a bunch of recipes from the time of the Mayans and that was really cool. I’ve also put on farm dinners for the local farmers which are fun because they bring in the food and I make something for them. But the Valentine’s Day dinners are always popular. The second year I did a six course Cuban dinner, last year I did another Italian dinner and this year I am doing a French dinner. It is going to be fun and I am even growing a mustache and will be dressing up like a French chef to make it more like a theater. In the past I’ve done all communal dinning, where everyone is at one big table – but this year I decided to go the opposite way. There will only be tables of two and I plan on having 28 people at different times throughout the evening. I chose five dishes from the 1919 Hotel St. Francis cookbook by the French chef Victor Hirtzler, which includes beef bourguignon and sea bass. The movie Julie and Julia prompted me to use this book. I really like Victor and he’s as famous as Julia Childs, but no one has heard of him. He was just famous during his time as the first chef at the St. Francis from 1904-1929. They still talk about him at the restaurant and I am hoping it will prompt some people from the area to come up here.”
SMT: “Do you get a lot of out-of-towners at your restaurant?”
RM: “Actually, most of my clientele are from the Bay Area and own cabins here and eat at the restaurant on a regular basis. I do have a small following of local people…which is starting to grow. This Christmas season I got a lot of new people from the Sonora area which was great to see. It’s been a slow evolution, but those who have stuck with it really enjoy themselves here. It wasn’t anything I had really planned out – it was just something that kind of came about through a whole series of events. I had no idea that these events would create the unique environment that the restaurant has turned into. Now that I’ve been into it a few years, I really like this style and the people that are accustomed to it really like it too. There isn’t really anything else like it.”
SMT: “How would you describe your restaurant’s style?”
RM: “It’s a taste of something different…because it is different. It’s different all the time. When someone comes in I’ll ask them what they are interested in and I’ll fix them something. A lot of people who come here now have gotten used to the style of the place they don’t even look at the menu. They’ll just say, fix me something to eat, or we want to stay within this budget, or we want a salad or pizza and I just fix things for them. That way it really makes it fun. The difference between my place and a regular restaurant is that I’m not in a rush to get people to leave…they can stay as long as they want. So if there is a line of people out the door they’ll have to come back or go somewhere else. I also don’t do large groups because with the pizza cooking at such a high temperature I really feel I am giving a better quality pizza by only cooking a few at a time – which doesn’t allow me to do large groups that demand a lot of food all at once. It works better for me and the other customers as well because what happens here that doesn’t happen in other restaurants is that when you sit down and order your food, it doesn’t all come at once. If the whole room fills up then one piece goes to each table at a time until it’s done. So I tell people to look at the menu carefully and order things that everybody can share.”
SMT: “What would you tell a newcomer to your restaurant?”
RM: “It’s hard for people who have never been here because they come in and sit and wait to be served, but once my wife gives them the spiel of how everything works, they enjoy themselves. I like promoting this place as a whole different style of a place to dine, as opposed to eat. It’s not a place to fuel up. You can’t be in a hurry to come and eat. It’s not always slow, but sometimes it is and I want people to be prepared for that. It’s a good place to socialize. When we are busy, it’s a very diverse culture in here – at times there are people from all over the world. Customers just need to be open to the idea of not comparing this to another restaurant or what restaurants have always been in the past. You can go into any restaurant and get served and order things off a menu, but there aren’t many where you can come in and say, ‘I really liked what I had last time, could you cook me something that I might as well.’”
The Prospector is owned by Robert and Ruth Martin and is located at 23092 Fuller Road in Twain Harte and is open Tuesday-Sunday form 5 to 8:30 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m. For daily menus and to see live streaming videos of Robert making his Italian pizzas, visit www.prospectorwines.com. For more information, call 209-586-1313.
