Woody's

A raging wood oven in hot weather in the middle of the city? Now this is pizza.

by Stephen Heuser

58 Hemenway Street (Fenway), Boston; 375-9663
Open daily from 11 a.m. to midnight
AE, Di, MC, Visa, TM
Beer and wine
Sidewalk-level access

In 90-degree summer weather, nothing sounds less appealing than being cooped up in a room with the crimson-hot coals of a wood oven. Which is why I'm glad I don't work at Woody's Grill & Tap. But in the summertime, as at any time of year, a wood fire produces about the best pizza you're going to eat: thin-crusted, precise, with a nicely puffed rim around the outside.

Woody's occupies a low-visibility spot in a college neighborhood, not far from Northeastern University's residence halls. The space was previously home to a gently upscale Italian place called Piccolo Pomodoro that opened last year and never quite clicked with the neighborhood. The owners of Woody's had the bright idea of converting the space to a handsome but inexpensive bar and grill -- sponged yellow walls, blue banquettes, wood trim -- where they would put the barely used wood oven to work baking $8 pizzas.

That idea seems to have panned out. A solid crowd, and not just a collegiate one, turns up for the pizza, the beer, and the grab bag of other dishes on the menu. By simply piling food on the plate, Woody's does a good job of giving people their money's worth. And by taking at least reasonable care on the grill, or in the oven, it ensures a nice return business.

For starters, there's a pleasant house salad with an acidic cider vinaigrette for $3.50, and a slightly fancier mesclun-type medley for $4.75. In a New England gesture, there's also a "Maine crab cake salad" ($6.95), which consists of two smooth crab patties without a lot of filler, laid over lettuce and surrounded with exactly four piles of a light slaw of carrot, red cabbage, and fennel.

Woody's serves one appetizer that looks like it belongs in a food magazine: the roasted clams ($7.50), a bowl of steaming littlenecks that have, to judge by their shells, spent time under very high heat. The clam meat itself was a little chewy, but the shells were a gorgeous calico of white and tan and deep umber. Adding to the effect was a thicket of thyme sprigs, heated till crisp and laid across the top.

Other appetizers weren't bad, but they weren't quite so successful, either. The "crispy polenta" ($6.50) was more like spongy polenta (it even came in a pool of liquid), though the accompanying seared oyster mushrooms and sundried tomatoes had good flavor. The calamari dish ($6.95) was a wildly ample quantity of squid fried in a nondescript semolina batter. And the black-bean quesadilla ($4.95) had a perfectly crisped tortilla exterior, but the filling of beans and cheese was just a touch bland.

Of course, people do tend to visit Woody's for the pizza. The heat of a stone-lined wood oven cooks pizzas quickly, crisping the dough without baking the flavor out of delicate ingredients like clams and garlic. And the pizzas here come in any number of permutations, the most unusual of which may have been the Greek pizza ($7.50 small, $10.25 large), which arrived not only with olives, feta, and tomatoes, but with a whole salad's worth of fresh spinach leaves on top.

A small Woody's pizza, after an appetizer, feeds two people perfectly well; a large would probably feed three. The menu provides a fistful of preconceived suggestions (the Greek pizza; the sausage pizza; the "Jamaican jerk," with spicy chicken and red onions) and then offers a list of further ingredients that can be put together however you like. One nice thing is that most of the named pizzas come with a little twist: the salad on the Greek, for instance, or the meat on the sausage pizza ($7.25, $9.95). The meat isn't ground pork but rather slices of spicy Portuguese linguiça, which is matched with leeks, goat cheese, and roasted red peppers to create an unusual -- and very good -- pan-European dinner.

Like many of the pizzas at Woody's, that one came without tomato sauce. We finally made a point of ordering a pizza with sauce, starting with a basic pie (sauce and cheese), then adding roasted garlic, sundried tomatoes, and roasted red peppers. It ended up tasting pretty good -- especially the plump cloves of garlic -- and it cost only $6.75. But the plain, sweetish sauce didn't leave any impression at all, and it softened up the otherwise firm crust.

Woody's does offer a few things beyond pizza. The swordfish (at $13.95, the most expensive thing on the menu) was ambitious and surprisingly good. The dish paired a classic piece of grilled fish, nicely cross-hatched with char marks (if a tiny bit overcooked), with a big scoop of black beans that the menu calls "black bean relish," but which was more a of a Mexican bean salad perked up with sliced linguiça. Piled up against the beans was a salad of warm arugula with a strong taste of cracked black pepper, and crowning the whole arrangement -- literally -- was a teepee-shaped hat of thin tortilla strips.

For its next trick, Woody's serves a grilled chicken breast with a vegetable risotto ($11.95), and covers the chicken with a white-wine sauce and an entire salad of mesclun. The chicken itself was cooked perhaps a bit too vigorously to be genuinely tender, but it looked great. The sauce was punchy, augmented with about a half-jar's worth of capers, and the risotto was satisfying in a salty and glutinous and not-too-refined way.

Desserts at Woody's were as large-scale as dinner, but didn't impress us as much. Fudge brownies ($4.75), served with vanilla ice cream and little curlicues of caramel around the plate, were drier than they might have been, and the ice cream (I'm betting) had partly thawed at some point that day before being put back in the freezer. Another night we tried tiramisú ($4.95), which -- since someone had forgotten to soak the ladyfinger layer in any kind of liqueur -- turned out to be a square of mascarpone-frosted cake.

But Woody's is one of those restaurants that fills you up to the point where dessert isn't much of a temptation. The beer list runs to 18 or so taps, and the atmosphere is friendly and busy. And there are cool little touches, like the wrought-iron stands that suspend the pizza over the polished granite tables: they're shaped like bent stickmen, reminiscent of the FAHVERNüGEN logo.

We did run into a little trouble with our servers; they tended to get lost as the evening wore on, and once I even resorted to waving at the host to send someone over with a check. But it's not such a fussy place that I couldn't have hunted the waitress down myself. She wouldn't have minded, and I really didn't either. It's just not that kind of place.