Fuel Pizza: Building Community through Pizza

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Photos:  Demarcus Davis/DC Spotlight Newspaper

March 1, 2012
By Alex Barron
Restaurant Critic
Bon Appetit

Prior to the January opening of Fuel Pizza on K Street, restaurateur Jeremy Wladis spent quite a few years with his eye fixed firmly on Washington, D.C. as a prospective home for a new branch of his Charlotte, North Carolina-based pizza franchise. “We had been canvassing D.C. for seven years, trying to find the right spot,” Wladis recalls. “This is just the perfect market for us.” On paper, Fuel Pizza and D.C. seem like an ideal match. Although casual pizza places have been sprouting up all over the area during the past year, the pizza market is still under saturated, unlikepizza-heavy neighbors to the north in Boston, New York and Philly. To expatriates from these areas, Fuel’s affordable, fresh pies are a welcomed addition to what was — until recently — K Street’s relatively desolate landscape. Really though, appreciation isn’tlimited to relocated east coasters. As Wladis puts it, “Everyone in the world can appreciate good pizza.”

The first Fuel Pizza opened in a 1930s style car garage, not far from downtown Charlotte. In homage to that structure, D.C.’s Fuel Pizza is richly decorated with delightfully kitschy gas station paraphernalia: rusty Gulf, Shell, and Firestone signs, ancient gas pumps, and obsolete advertisements for Nehi Cola adorn the walls, while old oil cans hang from the ceiling. According to Wladis, Fuel’s name is not only an allusion to the site of the original restaurant, but to the movie Barfly, in which Mickey Rourke’s character says — in an attempt to explain his drinking — “The guts need fuel.” Fuel’s owners might say the same in reference to the organic ingredients the restaurant uses for their pizza, the list of which hangs in several spots around the upstairs and downstairs dining rooms. Their strict standards for ingredients — unbleached flour, vine-ripened tomatoes and fresh mozzarella — pay dividends in the final product. All the pizzas are crispy, cheesy without feeling like overkill, and appreciably lighter than the average pie from, say, Dominoes or Papa John’s. (Prices range from $9.99 for a 12″ cheese pizza to $15.99 for a 19″. A large specialty pie is $16.99.)

The kitchen also has a bit of a creative streak. In addition to the usual specialties like Hawaiian and BBQ Chicken, Fuel trots out such selections as the Riviera (artichokes, spinach, feta, and kalamata olives), the Pyramid (which boasts ingredients from all of the groups in the food pyramid), and on occasion, the Old Bay Crab Pizza — an incongruous creation likely to appeal to Chesapeake Bay natives. The menu also features salads, wings and garlic knots, all of which are serviceable. The main attraction here, however, is the pizza.

The drink menu, which features Fat Tire and several other quality beers, as well as five varieties of wine, is more extensive than one would expect from a neighborhood pizza joint. Finally, the Cinnamon Knots, fresh bits of dough tossed in cinnamon, sugar and sticky icing, elevate dessert from afterthought status.

For all of its buttoned-down lobbying firms, and its serious fine dining options — Bombay Club, The Oval Room, etc. — the K Street area has never been big on neighborhood charm, a deficiency that Fuel is trying its best to remedy. In Fuel’s new home, manager Zach Current, a Charlotte transplant, sees a friendly community, ready to welcome an unpretentious pizza joint. “I come from a sleepy southern city, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it’s been great!” says Current. “I’ve met more people from Charlotte here than I did when I lived there.” Southerners, northerners, Washingtonians, even lobbyist — so it seems — all need fuel for their guts.

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DC Spotlight Restaurant Critic

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