Pizza Review: Petrillo’s Pizza Restaurant (San Gabriel)
slutty Italian food [sluht-ee ih-tal-yuhn food]
noun
-
- Pizza and pasta slathered in marinara sauce that’s as fluorescent as the dark squares on the vinyl red-checkered table cloths that they’re served upon, sometimes preceded by a Caesar salad featuring one-part dressing and two-parts croutons to one-part romaine lettuce. Usually handled by a sweaty, hairy, sixty-something woman who claims to have family in Sicily, but you’re never really sure if she’s telling you the truth. You’ll resolve to believe her as long as she kindly brings you free spumoni ice cream at the end of the meal.
Synonyms: Paradise
I grew up with a deep love for slutty Italian food. If you know it, you know it. From the kind of joint where they slap a random ethnic-sounding name on the sign out front, they get an old couple to shout a few accented words out of the kitchen every so often, and they repaint the walls enough times to be able to start a few innocent rumors that there were three different mafia hits in the main dining room, back in the day. There isn’t any place in Italy with remotely similar food. Maybe Jersey, but not Italy.
In my childhood suburban corner of San Diego County, the place was called Borrelli’s. I ate my weight there in oily pizza and overcooked pasta and garlic bread where the butter never fully melted – maybe it was actually margarine. I ate so much at my sixth grade birthday party there that I blew chunks in the parking lot and had to stay home sick for the next two days in a row. The following year, in seventh grade, Mrs. Hurley finally decided that I could write when I penned an essay professing my love for Borrelli’s. She had me read it aloud to the class to showcase my vivid use of adjectives – gooey, acidic, fatty, sumptuous, heavenly – and everybody stared at me gobsmacked as I rattled off every one of the dozen-or-so dishes I would eat over the course of a single dinner. Finally, the squeaky-voiced Jeff Larson, who made up for his small stature by riding a cool-ass dirtbike every day after school, broke the silence: “You eat… all of that? Every time you go!? How do your parents afford it!?” Jeff later went on to play Bilbo in the Hi8-shot adaptation of The Hobbit that I directed for the same English class, and on our dinner break between scenes, we had none other than Borrelli’s.
These kinds of places are a dime-a-dozen on the East Coast, and usually the food’s pretty good. But here on the West Coast, they’re a dying breed, which makes those that live on especially worth cherishing, even if they can’t compete quality-wise with those in New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The beloved Mama Petrillo’s in Temple City closed on New Year’s Eve of last year, and I still kick myself for never making my way over there. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake with Petrillo’s Pizza Restaurant – just Petrillo’s, no Mama in front – in nearby San Gabriel, which has been around since 1954. Back then, there weren’t many Chinese residents in the San Gabriel Valley; now, the storefronts are covered in Chinese characters, and this Italian joint truly feels like a relic of another time. If you grab a pizza here and an Old Fashioned at Al’s Cocktail Lounge – another delight in the neighborhood – you can begin to imagine what it was like to be a white working-class stiff in the SGV of the ’50s and ’60s. But then you catch a whiff of dim sum, and the cultural and political factors of the intervening decades, which are just as much a part of the rich fabric of my favorite alcove of LA suburbia, catch up with you.
But Petrillo’s keeps on rolling, and even though it feels out of place nowadays, patrons seem to come from all over the SGV for the pizza and pasta. Having commuted the 20 minutes from Pasadena, I seemed to be more the rule than the exception. For now, what with Covid, only the takeout window is open, but if the evening I picked up my pie is any indication, they seem to maintaining a healthy clip of phone orders. The same goes for their second location, a little farther east in Glendora. This is one of those places that you could easily call an “institution,” but doing so would only scratch the surface of a surely colorful history.
Unfortunately, I wish I liked the pizza as much as the aesthetic. This is what I call a “ball of dough pizza,” which is to say, as each slice tumbles down your esophagus and into your digestive system, I imagine they roll up into one giant snowball. Hopefully for our GI tracts, they don’t become sedimentary rocks, but there are no guarantees with slutty Italian food. Don’t get me wrong: I find it very satisfying to gulp down fistfuls of dough, and the crust at Petrillo’s has a delightfully gluten-rich taste that gives the floury globs a real sense of character as you chew and chew and chew some more. But there’s a difference between a pizza that provides gluttonous pleasure, as this one most certainly does, and a genuinely good pizza.
The ingredients that top the thick, puffy-but-dense crust are serviceably hearty, but nothing you wouldn’t expect to find your Nonna buying at the nearby Costco in Alhambra. The sauce has the requisite red fluorescence, acting as the proper cement for slutty Italian bricklaying. The cheese is best eaten on cold pizza the next day, once it has coagulated into a thick, lasagna-like layer in the fridge. Indeed, if you’ve had one too many of the stiff drinks at Al’s, I’d imagine this to be a first-rate hangover pie. The pepperoni is large and plentifully spread, but also a little rubbery on the greasy underside. (By the way, while I only formally review the plain pepperoni pizza, I did love, love, love the virtually flavorless white onions also available as a topping – a staple of slutty Italian cuisine – which took me right back to Borrelli’s with their blackened ends.)
And yet, what this pizza lacks in true quality, it sure makes up for in quantity. You know this place was started by a couple who had survived the Great Depression, because one pie was clearly intended to feed an Italian American family of seven for a month. The medium pizza, which runs about $25, is the size of any other joint’s extra large – and likely twice the thickness. It’s cut in the most off-kilter pattern, mixing triangles and squares and God knows what other geometric shapes – in a pattern that I’m sure comes second-nature to the fellas in the kitchen, but looks an awful lot like the puzzles that I failed to solve on the Gifted and Talented Education test, hoisting me into Mrs. Hurley’s remedial English period. If this slicing method has existed since 1954, I’d consider it a Dadaist triumph over the prevailing squareness of the era. While I’m usually an equilateral triangle guy when it comes to pizza, who doesn’t want to try a pie that delivers equilateral, isosceles, square, and rhombus in one meal?
When the dining room reopens at Petrillo’s, I will surely cross under the tattered awnings and proceed to stuff myself silly, dragging whatever friends I can convince to sit around the table and order more appetizers than we have people. By the time the pizza comes out, no one will have enough room left, but we’ll keep going anyway. This is the kind of place where you can vibe your heart out, relishing the nostalgia you feel for a time that you didn’t even experience. I can see it in my mind: I was in the back of a wood-paneled station wagon, driving down S. Gladys Ave. and waving at the short, burly Italian dad watering the lawn with a seafoam garden hose pointed to the sky, wearing a wifebeater with slacks and discount loafers from Penny’s that his wife pointed out in the LA Times circular, before rounding the corner and collecting a medium pepperoni pie from Petrillo’s for a couple bucks. Maybe in a past life.
That’s what slutty Italian food is: a feeling as much as a meal. And that’s why Petrillo’s, for all its technical faults, hits the spot in its own sloppy, saucy way.
78/100
Petrillo’s Pizza Restaurant is open seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m, with hours extending to 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, at 833 E. Valley Blvd. in San Gabriel. Place an order by calling (626) 280-7332; no online ordering is available.
My First Bite Reaction (on YouTube):