Cicero has a whole string of pizza places and noteworthy restaurants lined up down a central strip on Jackson Street. We found out about DeLullo's from a post by Visit Hamilton County. The atmosphere was a cozy converted house that felt like dinner with friends or like a private party with the locals.
And boy do the locals turn up for DeLullo’s, it was pretty empty at 5:45 and suddenly at 6:00pm it was hoppin. I was severely under dressed in jeans, t-shirt, and a neck gator, especially on Valentine’s weekend, oops! Folks beside us were having oysters and wearing suit jackets. In my defense, I Googled trattoria and according to Wikipedia, a trattoria is an Italian-style eating establishment that is generally much less formal than a ristorante - so there!
We started with mozzarella bread as an appetizer, which came with four slices. The crusty sourdough with fluffy middle brushed with garlic butter and mozzarella cheese was phenomenal, and made other garlic breads seem like cheap knock offs. I could eat this bread all day. And check out the crunchy crispy bits on the edge!
Chris and I each got our own pizzas. I went with a specialty pizza because if something is called DeLullo's Special you've just gotta try it to see what it's all about.
This is DeLullo’s Special from DeLullo's Trattoria in Cicero. It’s got prosciutto, Italian sausage, red onion, ricotta cheese, roasted red peppers, spinach, and fresh garlic. The combination of flavors was elegant with creamy, salty, and fresh all rolled together. The sausage was very fine, almost like sausage sand rather than larger crumbles.
If I’m being a little picky, this pizza suffered from the cheese blanket effect where there is actually so much cheese on top and chunky ingredients below that it separates into layers with cheese and spinach coming off in sheets leaving the sausage below. Still delicious though! I've seen this cheese blanket effect at other places, but the most obvious was probably New Bethel Ordinary.
Again I think my specialty pizza won out over Chris' basic pepperoni and bacon.
I would definitely go back. In fact, Cicero is huge on my radar for great pizza places all within a few blocks of each other. Our neighbor recommended another place in Cicero just down the street so we'll have to check them out too.
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