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SCARSDALE, N.Y. Chas Anderson, who grew up on the Eastchester-Scarsdale line and studied cooking in Europe, brought a lot of the old country back home when he decided to open an upscale pizza restaurant in the heart of Eastchester.
Burrata Wood-Fired Pizza opened at 425 White Plains Road, near the Mill Road intersection, in February, serving a variety of "classic Neapolitan" pizzas, appetizers and desserts. The menu includes appetizers and salads such as wood-roasted red and yellow beets with pistachios, octopus with potatoes and red onion, burrata with heirloom cherry tomatoes and aged balsamic vinegar and Frisee poached egg and pancetta served with a mustard vinaigrette. On the sweet side, there's cannolo, panna cotta and chocolate lava cake with Tahitian vanilla gelato.
Burrata also offers wine by the glass or bottle, beer and liquor.
But the centerpiece is the pizza; 12-inch pies on thin, no more than .3 centimeters, crusts made from Caputo OO pizza flour imported from Naples.
"It's super fine," said restaurant manager Joseph Polizzi, explaining the OO rating. "It's a milling they use to mill the flour. Our tomatoes are imported from Puglia, Italy. Our mozzarella and burrata is made for us by a farmer in Vermont whose head cheese maker is also from Puglia, home of burrata cheese. Whatever we don't source from Italy is local."
All of the ingredients are brought together in a wood-fired oven built by third-generation oven-maker Stefano Ferrara. Hand built in Naples, the oven, Anderson said, is insulated with the volcanic soil of Mount Vesuvius in the insulation. It cooks the hand-formed pizzas in 60 to 90 seconds. Anderson said it is the only oven of its type in Westchester County, and one of just 30 in the United States.
Even the mixer is imported from Italy, "meant for very fine, wet artisanal dough," Anderson said.
"Pizza is a flatbread," Anderson said. "If you know how to bake, and build flavor and develop texture in a bread, then the quality of the ingredients you put on top of that foundation of the bread will achieve a superior pizza."
Anderson, whose father, Chuck, owns La Dentelliere in Scarsdale, attended the French Culinary Institute and a culinary school in Colorno, outside Parma, Italy. He studied under Chef Gualtiero Marchesi, who, he said, brought Italian cuisine up to Michelin standards and ran the first Italian restaurant to earn three stars from the rating group.
Burrata is open for lunch from noon to 3 p.m. daily and for dinner from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturday and 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday. They prepare food for takeout, but do not deliver. Call (914) 337-3700.
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