Mill City Kitchen elevates pizza, offers so much more: City Juice with John Malik
Great pizza has several requirements: one is great flour, another is a wood-fired oven.
There are but a handful of pizza places in our town that use wood-fired ovens, and even fewer that use great flour. Mill City Kitchen does both, and its pizza is very close to the best pizza in town. A few years ago, owner John Shepherd was watching pizza maestro Chris Bianco on Netflix’s “Chef’s Table.” Bianco spent years looking for the best pizza flour and found it in Arizona.
“After watching that episode of ‘Chef’s Table,’ I knew I had to have that flour from Hayden (Flour) Mills,” Shepherd said. “It took some doing and now that’s the only flour we use, and what a difference it makes. We recently hosted Marilena Barbera, a Sicilian winemaker, for a five-course menu, one of which was handmade pasta, which of course was made with the same flour. She raved over our pasta.”
Mill City Kitchen is casual, and its menu is full of fairly humble ingredients like black beans, chicken, pork shoulder, basmati rice, cabbage and collard greens. The food, however, is anything but humble. At my most recent visit, my wife and I enjoyed a crab rangoon pizza topped with cream cheese mixed with fresh crab and a Thai chili sauce. The pizza crust had an admirable interior crumb, and it sported the perfect amount of char with that wonderful touch of wood smoke. This is what pizza should aspire to.
Shepherd and business partner Jason Donnelly put in a lot of hours making sure Mill City’s food exceeds expectations. The pizza dough requires a three-day mixing and proofing process, the barbecue pork cooks overnight, and, thanks to their small wine shop next door, the restaurant offers intriguing wines and no corkage fees on any bottle purchased there. And I promise you won’t see grocery store wines here.
Mill City Kitchen goes to a lot of trouble to turn out great food, yet the average price of an entree is less than $20.
The open kitchen hosts some unusual pieces of equipment, too.
“We wanted really cool kitchen equipment like our rotisserie, the big wood-burning oven and the Argentinian style grill, both of which use wood,” Donnelly told me. That stuff makes a difference and offers us an opportunity to make an affordable meal something memorable.”
Although Mill City Kitchen has been open barely six months, I believe this may be my favorite casual restaurant in our fair city. The location at Judson Mill offers plenty of free parking, it offers indoor and outdoor seating, the prices are modest, and the kitchen is skilled. The food is packed with flavor and if one fancies a nice bottle of wine with dinner, Mill City has that covered. You really should go.
Mill City Kitchen, at Judson Mill, is open for lunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday.
“City Juice” is a colloquial term for a glass of tap water served at a diner. John Malik is a restaurant coach and hospitality consultant. He can be reached at chefjohnmalik@gmail.com.
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