A good-looking pizza at a good-looking place
By Christina Melander

The Portland Tribune Dec 28, 2001

In Italian, bella faccia means “pretty face,” and that’s what you get when you arrive at this good-looking Northeast pizza parlor: a buxom pizza maid who’s pictured on the wood-carved sign above the door.
Inside Bella Faccia Pizzeria, great light fixtures illuminate sunburst orange walls.
One drawback to the cool space, open since late June, is its size. In fairer weather, Bella Faccia supplements its limited seating with an elegant back-yard patio. Right now, you might have to arm-wrestle other shelter-seeking diners for a table.

Another drawback, one that easily could be fixed, is difficulty with ordering. There’s only a small takeout menu taped to the counter in front of the register. Additional takeout menus may be on hand; if they’ve gone missing, you have no time to mull over the choices before it’s your turn at the register. A blackboard that displays beer options could be put to better use by listing the food.

Some helpful things to know before placing an order: All pies are whopping 18-inchers (there also are daily selections of individual slices). The staff will deliver your salads and pizza, but you will have to retrieve your own drinks and utensils.

Bella Faccia makes significant concessions to vegetarians. Veggie pies outnumber the meat-laden ones and include a vegan pizza with a roasted pepper-cashew base and marinated tempeh.

The general pizza menu ranges from traditional pepperoni and cheese to the likes of Il Padrino, which layers mozzarella, prosciutto, green peppers and mushrooms over an olive oil-garlic base, and the artichoke pesto-sauced Aphrodite. Bella Faccia turns out these wide-ranging styles with equal aplomb, tempting East Coast transplants with an expert, foldable crust.

Salads impress with their freshness and volume Ѡa mini is quite a plateful. If you’ve just run a marathon or something, you might be hungry enough to tackle the custom calzone.

Mercury

August 16, 2001
Bella Faccia Pizzeria

By Wm. Stevev Humphrey

Pizza can, and probably always will be, problematic. It's odd that such an inherently simple dish can be so well-loved, yet so rarely satisfying. After all, at the end of the day, a pizza is just some bread, tomato sauce and cheese--there are only finite ways in which to improve it. It's not unusual, then, that large pizza corporations are resorting to acts of desperation to improve sales--squirting cheese into the crust, ladling 27 lbs. of meat on every pie--doing everything they can to put a little excitement into a boring food. I mean, does anyone try this stuff with broccoli?
As far as Portland is concerned, pie purchasers have mostly given up, preferring to gather with friends around a disappointing Papa Murphy's Take 'n' Bake, and wax poetic about the lovely, cheese-laden slices of New York. And while not even the world's grandest pie will ever come close to the way an ex-New Yorker can remember it, Bella Faccia Pizzeria comes pretty damn near.

Specializing in 18'' pies, slices, and beer, Bella Faccia smartly gets back to the basics. Focusing specifically on the pizza's three main components (crust, sauce, cheese), this upstart pizzeria ignores the bells and whistles and attempts to bring out the best of each ingredient. After eating there five times, I've found the crust to be remarkably consistent in both crispness and flavor. Roughly thin as a quarter, it easily has the strength to keep its ingredients on the pie and out of your lap. The sauce is remarkably savory, with just a whisper of sweetness. The cheese is 100% whole milk mozzarella that is added with admirable restraint, instead of being a poorly rendered disguise.
With such care shown for the foundation, it would be hard to screw up the rest of this pizza. But Bella Faccia takes it a step further with absolutely fresh vegetables and smoky meats. Get whatever you want on it; it's gonna be good (even the historically questionable "Hawaiian" which knocked me on my ass with it's flavorable ham). And did I mention they have PBR? Goddam. Say what you will; you can't find that in New York City.