Forcella Restaurant By Chef Giulio Adriani

Pizza goes for a dip in the fryer

At Williamsburg's two-month-old Forcella, you can bide your time with antipasti and salads, but what you are really there for is fried pizza.

This is not some State Fair experiment gone wackadoo. Rather, four-time world pizza champion Giulio Adriani mans the custom, ultramarine-tiled pizza oven.

That oven was built by Acunto (the same craftsmen behind Kesté's hallowed hearth) and transported from Naples on a container ship, but it's Adriani who has truly put in the time–he's been making pizza since he was 13.

He expertly takes the essentials of a Neapolitan Margherita pizza and turns it into a montanara ($10), flash-frying the dough for 30 seconds, then sending it on a trip into the oven to soak up excess oil. The crust takes on the best parts of both baking and frying–it's crisp while being puffy, and just a little oily as well.

For still more fry, move on to the ripieno alla scarola ($10), which looks as if a calzone tripped and fell into a vat of fry oil. It contains no cheese, merely the raw sharpness of escarole, capers and anchovies.

Snag a table within the next month while the restaurant still has its BYOB policy. Then, in September look for a second location on the Bowery.

And you'll soon be able to get your fried-dough fix at the brand-new PizzArte (a beacon among the Midtown pizza wasteland). In Septemeber, the restaurant's uniquely tangy dough will be taking a dip too.

Forcella La Pizza di Napoli, 485 Lorimer St. (at Grand St.), Brooklyn; 718-388-8820 or forcellaeatery.com; PizzArte, 69 W. 55th St. (at Sixth Ave.); 212-247-3936 or pizzarteny.com