One bright and lovely November morning, Kathryn Mathis arrived at her restaurant, Pizzeria Gusto, to light the Beast. That’s the name she’s affectionately given the three ton pizza oven, handmade in Naples, Italy, by a master craftsman named Stefano Ferrara. (“Ferrara is the Ferrari of pizza ovens,” Mathis shares.) The fire must be fed every day and carefully maintained, like a live organism.
Seven hours later, just as dinner service was beginning, a somewhat jaded food writer from New York City strolled in. Mathis, moving with grace and sureness, took a pound of dough, carefully pounded it, shaped it, added mozzarella cheese and San Marzano tomatoes, and put it in the Beast. Then came the careful minutes of shifting the pizza from the warm spot in the oven to the cooler spot, then raising it toward the domed top.
“Making pizza is like dancing,” Mathis says, “and just working the oven – knowing when and where to feed wood, controlling the airflow – is a dance in itself. During the rush, we’re working like a beautifully oiled machine.”
The critic looked, tasted and was amazed; he was transported back in time, to old pizza shops in New York, to a visit with his parents to an outdoor pizzeria in a village just outside Naples.
“You must be from New York!” he declared.
“No,” Mathis replied, “I’m from Guymon, Oklahoma.”
The windswept high plains of the Oklahoma panhandle are not where you’d expect a master pizzaiola to hail from. But “my mom was a good cook,” Mathis recalls, “and as a kid I was always in the kitchen, stirring a pot.”
While at college, she took a job as a server. They needed a prep cook too; she tried it and was hooked.
For four years, she did French fine dining at Montrachet in OKC, then came a decade in Austin. She returned to OKC, but there was something she missed.
“Why,” she asked, “isn’t there a place where I can grab a really great taco and go?” Thus followed Big Truck Tacos, which she still runs.
“I stop there every day for a tortilla and beans,” she says. “We ran out of food at 3:00 p.m. on the first day,” she recalls, and it’s been like that ever since.
How can you top something like that? The answer is Pizzeria Gusto. She and her business partner Marina Rabinovich “wanted it to be your neighborhood place,” says Mathis. “We’re kid-friendly and community driven. Building a community around food is very important to me. When you think about being with friends, you want to be somewhere warm and inviting.”
There are wonderfully creative drinks, lots of small plates on the menu and one or two entrees, like grilled short rib. But the focus is on the pizza. The dough takes five days to make, although Mathis doesn’t fastidiously follow Neapolitan recipes. She’s creative, and she has discovered that “the flavor profile is more interesting” if only a tiny amount of yeast (2 ounces for 55 pounds of flour) is mixed with the flour, but that way requires three days of fermentation. This produces a glorious crust, the stuff of legend, charred where it should be, and pleasantly chewy. Yes, the crust is the glory, but lots of toppings are available. The sausages are made by hand.
Mathis still marvels at all the happy people who fill her restaurant. Italians visiting horse shows in the city, couples seeking a romantic evening, people stopping for a quick lunch, or even birthday parties for 11 year olds.
“It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from,” Mathis says. “All sit down to our tables and eat.”
Main image cutline: At Pizzeria Gusto, you’ll find savory pies with hand-stretched dough, San Marzano tomatoes and house-made sausage. Photos by Hannah Hudson
