CARBONI’S

[July 23rd, 2008] Is it a pizza place or a barbecue joint? If one restaurant could do both really well, no one would care about such an identity crisis. But while the pizza at 10-month-old Carboni’s, formerly Wildfire Wood-Fired Pizza & Barbeque, has real potential, the meats from the pit are a mess.

Pizzas, thin-crusted, crispy and baked in a wood-fired oven, are the best eats the house has to offer. While the slightly charred, blistery dough is a contender for the city’s best crust, the toppings and bland sauce can fall short. Try the spicy sopressata ($12 for a 12-inch, $22 for a 16-inch pie) or cheeseless marinara ($8 for a 12-inch, $14 for a 16-inch), but avoid the funghi ($12, $22) with flaccid, chewy ’shrooms and a pungent truffle-oil drizzle. A Caesar salad ($8 whole, $4.50 half) was a competent version of the staple, with crisp romaine hearts and a rich, garlicky housemade dressing.

Getting one of those pies, however, may prove tricky. Staffing appears oddly thin and service can be flighty at best and downright neglectful at worst. The space, too, feels strangely unfinished and thrown together, as though there’s just not enough time or able bodies to polish the place up. That’s a pity, because the room has lots of natural light, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a relaxed informality, brightened by the glow from the front-and-center cooking area and its star, that brick oven.

And then there’s the disappointing barbecue. The pulled pork ($6 lunch sandwich, $13 dinner plate with two sides) was the best of the bunch, with a heap of tired, not-so-smoky meat drizzled with a small amount of the sweet, housemade barbecue sauce. The pork spareribs ($7.50 lunch, $14-$17 dinner) were crusted in a blackened layer of spices, which yielded (with effort) to reveal leathery, tough, nearly translucent meat. The beef brisket ($6 lunch sandwich, $14 dinner plate) was nearly flavorless, rubbery in texture, and while plentiful, not appealing. The disconnect is odd, since owner Kevin Hutchinson says his customers balked when he took his barbecue-pit offerings off the menu in November. Carboni’s resurrected its ‘cue menu in mid-May.

Perhaps this kitchen is stretched too far with too few resources. Maybe it should try to perfect the thing it does reasonably well—pizza—and leave the barbecue to someone else.