The menu at Farina's, an Italian café on the newly-spruced up section of Main Street in Grapevine TX, is not particularly striking. Spinach artichoke dip. A meatball sandwich. A Muffaletta. Lasagna. Shrimp Scampi. Spaghetti. Pizza. Spaghetti pizza. Wait a min... huh?
That's right: Spaghetti pizza. This isn't spaghetti with a side of pizza, it's pizza with a layer of spaghetti baked onto the top of it. Remember when spaghetti tacos were a thing? Well here's another strange food combo just waiting for a teen television star to catapult it into the spotlight.
Now usually, I'm not a fan of pasta on pizza. You see it at some slice shops in New York and everywhere in Tokyo. Those pies generally come from the crap-holiest of the by-the-slice crapholes in the city, which means inferior crust, too-sweet sauce, waxy cheese, and in every case I've ever seen, cooked penne pasta that's added to the pie without sauce, and baked to the precise degree that it becomes dry and rubbery, but not until charred and crisp (the way a good baked pasta should be).
Farina's, on the other hand, takes the concept to a level I've never seen before. Saucy, cheesy spaghetti, piled onto a thin, crackery, bar-style crust, baked until the crust is nice and charred around the edges and the spaghetti just starts to crisp up on top.
Carb-on-carb is usually not my thing, and strangely topped pizza even less so, but in this case, I can make an exception. I may even cajole Adam into Home Slice'ing this one up. Adam?
The first spaghetti pizza was made at Farina's when a regular customer asked the owner to combine his two favorite dishes on the menu. It's since become such a hit with the regulars that it's now an official menu item. (Unofficial tip: you can order it with homemade meatballs. Do.)
Farina's
420 South Main Street Grapevine, TX 76051 (map); 817-442-9095; farinaswinery.homestead.com
About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.