Hot spot? Mozza is on fire

PIZZERIA MOZZA isn't just a restaurant. It's an action film, a master class in the art of making pizza, a trip through Italy's wine regions and a magnet for a diverse crowd of hungry diners only Los Angeles could muster. It's the toughest reservation in town, maybe in the country right now, the place where everybody in the food world wants to eat. After months of buzz and speculation, Nancy Silverton, who brought us La Brea Bakery and co-founded Campanile, and Mario Batali, the New York chef with a big appetite and an ever-growing collection of high-profile restaurants, have finally opened part one of Mozza at the corner of Melrose and Highland avenues. Part two, an \o7osteria\f7 (casual tavern), is to follow in the spring.

From a seat at the counter in front of the wood-burning pizza oven, you can see everything -- or at least everything that matters. A wire basket of brown eggs sits on the counter along with a bowl of pomegranates or persimmons and some cadmium red African daisies stuck casually into a vase. The fiftysomething woman behind the counter, dressed like a rich bohemian, her hair tucked up with barrettes and amber hanging from her earlobes, is Nancy Silverton.

Thwack! She attacks the billowy edges of a pizza that's just emerged from the oven, cutting the crackling crust into four quadrants with a rolling pizza cutter. Holding her thumb over the neck of an olive oil bottle, she splashes a little oil over, then rubs a bundle of dried oregano between her palms like somebody making a fire, showering the fragrant leaves over a simple tomato pizza.

To garnish the next pie in line, one with a loose, light tomato sauce garnished with saffron-colored squash blossoms, slit and spread out like the rays of the sun, she digs a spoon into a container of soft, creamy \o7burrata\f7 cheese. She moves to the next pizza in line, a classic Margherita, hauls a bouquet of basil from a glass of water and clack, clack, clack -- snips the leaves with a pair of scissors so that the leaves fall directly onto the pizza in artful disarray.

Her signature style

THERE'S something so sensual about Silverton's relationship to food and her aesthetic that's entirely her own -- direct, focused, uncompromised. She doesn't primp or fuss over her food. It's not art-directed or scripted. But it is entirely original and recognizably hers. And even if you're an Italian purist who's scandalized that she doesn't make pizza exactly like they do in Naples or someone who finds her food too simple and wonders what all the fuss is about, it's precisely this: Her food is vibrant and alive.