Last week I went to pick my son up from a friend’s house and he said he was hungry. It was well past dinnertime, but I decided to stop at a new neighbourhood pizza shop I heard had just opened up on Commercial Street.
Called Paisanos Slice Shop, we grabbed an assortment of pizza slices from what was left in the window as they were about to close for the night and then headed to the car.
My son tried it first — as a teenage boy who is interested in cooking and food he’s something of a pizza aficionado.
“Oh my god, it has so much flavour,” he gushed. “Even the crust. You know how, like, a lot of pizza has a kind of cardboard-ey crust? This one is good.”
I dove into the miso mushroom slice first and experienced what could best be described as a flavour explosion. It was creamy, mushroomy, slightly salty, with a soft sort of onion backdrop.
“Whoa. It’s like it has layers and layers of flavours, this is nuts,” I said to him with a laugh, and pulled over and put the car in park to finish it (yes, I was very slowly driving and eating).
“You have to try the pepperoni one, you have to,” my son said.
I’m sometimes not in the mood for meat on pizza and don’t often like pepperoni, but I picked it up regardless.
The pepperoni was thin and crispy, overlaid with a light, sweet sort of taste I couldn’t quite place and then garnished with blobs of what I later learned was creamed feta.
As we blissed out on slices in the parked car, I knew I had to figure out the story behind these pizzas.
“I knew we’d have to have a pepperoni [pizza] because people would be mad if we didn’t,” says Paisanos co-owner Kyle Frazer. “So I was trying to figure out how to not make it boring.”
The pepperoni is a “cup and char” style meat that curls up and crisps when you cook it.
And the sweet taste?
“That’s a hot honey. I mix it with a bunch of different dried peppers like ancho and chipotle,” he says. “I toast those and soak them, so they’re not dry anymore and then blitz it into the honey and then drain it, so that’s where that flavour comes from.”
Paisanos opened on June 28 and is one of a number of new stores that have opened up along the upper end of Commercial Street over the last year that are creating a vibrant new energy in downtown Nanaimo.
Other new shops in the immediate area include NoiseAgonyMayhem, a record label and storefront that features punk and eccentric knicknacks; Rumours Vintage Collective, which sells curated vintage clothes and home decor and Milk Jam Donuts, a high-end artisan donut shop.
Frazer got his start in culinary arts working at the Milton Street Public House for nine years, which is a restaurant in a converted house on — you got it — Milton Street that offers artisanal pub-style food and drinks.
He wanted to open his own establishment for some time, and though he’s always loved Italian food, when his business partner Chris suggested pizza, Frazer was initially reluctant.
Making pizzas walks the line between a job that is both creative and utilitarian, says Chris, who previously worked in construction.
“Construction is often a lot of traveling and it can be hard on the body,” he says. “I’ve been wanting to open my own food establishment for a while, and it’s finally come to fruition, after years and years.”
Once they decided on pizza, they started gathering the necessary equipment, which can be an incredibly costly hurdle for a small business that is just starting out.
Pizza ovens — even used ones — can run about $7,000, though the duo got lucky when Frazer’s mom found a free Baker’s Pride oven from the 1980s online. The only catch was that it was in a restaurant on Mayne Island.
Weighing in at about 700 pounds, “it was kind of an Excalibur situation — basically if you can lift it, you can take it,” says Frazer with a laugh. So they gathered up a group of friends, one of whom had a van, and went on a road trip. “It was quite the mission. I think we left here at six in the morning and got back to the shop at 9 p.m.”
Frazer says the miso mushroom pizza is probably his most successful innovation so far — and with lemon, mushrooms, a miso bechamel and caramelized shallots — I think I have to agree.
Paisanos Slice Shop is at 165 Commercial Street and is open from Wednesday to Saturday, 12 to 4:30 p.m. and then 5:30 to 9 p.m.
