Forno Rosso

Barese Pizza

We went to lunch at a place called Forno Rosso.  We saw this place a little while ago on Check Please. This is a brick oven pizza restaurant that has the distinction of being one of 2 restaurants in Chicago that have a VPN rating. VPN stands for Verace Pizza Napoletana - True Neapolitan Pizza.  This is an association from Naples.  In order to be certified with VPN a restaurant has to serve Neapolitan style pizza in a 900 degree oven. The pizza can only be cooked up to 90 seconds and must be made with only certain types of ingredients. There only about 500 restaurants in the world that have this certification.

We ordered 2 regular pizzas and a dessert pizza.

Capricciosa Pizza

1) Capricciosa - tomato sauce, artichokes, olives, mushrooms, prosciutto, fresh mozzarella
2) Barese - brocolli rabe, sausage, burrata cheese

The pizzas had thin crusts but still had a good texture (not cracker-like). The Barese pizza had a little more of a char to it than Nick would prefer. But over all we enjoyed all of the ingredients.

Nutella Dessert Pizza - nutella, strawberries and bananas
We had to try the dessert pizza because we love Nutella.  We made sure to box up some of the regular pizza to save room.  The dessert pizza was fun due to the ingredients but nothing overly special.

Nutella Pizza

Final thoughts on Forno Rosso:
Food - good pizzas.  If we lived closer we would go back.  Nick didn't find it that much different than other wood fired pizzas.

Service - in the middle of the day so a bit slow. But maybe they were going for a more relaxed European vibe.

Atmosphere - casual. There was a large group of people watching soccer matches on the televisions.