The Missing Brick showed me what I'd been missing in local flavor, with real ingredients that don't shy away from big taste.
Where to begin. The Missing Brick was a great experience from start to finish. When you've eaten as much pizza as I have in my lifetime, you don't really find pizza places that surprise you anymore. It's very rare nowadays that I try a new pizza place and I'm surprised with the pizza, but that's exactly what happened with The Missing Brick.
We found out about this place because we were tagged in a photo of their pizza by one of our followers @indyeatsss. I looked up the restaurant and saw that it was relatively close and on a route that Eric drives all the time to go to work. We decided since it was our first recommended place by one of our followers that we had to go.
Eric started by looking up their menu and realized this is not your average Joe pizza place. It's a small shop that can only cook 200 pizzas a night. We found out that there are nights when they sell out in the first hour of opening and people will sit and wait hours to get their pizza. If your order is the 200th pizza, and you order it at 6:30pm you are waiting until closing time to get it. Finding out all the info just made me even more excited to give this place a try (and to get there early).
We decided to get to the restaurant right at opening so we could beat any rush. The inside of the restaurant was closed for COVID-19, but they had a very large outdoor seating area with wooden picnic tables. They had music playing on the patio which was really nice. It was a mixed playlist of Rap and Hip Hop which is great because I love a little of everything. No I'm not just saying that. If you asked Siri to play my songs on shuffle it would probably go Taylor Swift, Lil Wayne, Krewella, Justin Timberlake, Drake, Carrie Underwood and then a Christmas song from the Carpenters or Ariana Grande before playing System of a Down.
The owner Que was actually the person who took our order. They were serving a house made sangria for Black Restaurant Week, some beers, some wines and soft drinks or bottled water. I ended up getting a Mango Margarita wine cocktail that was so tasty it's dangerous. It's the kind of drink you can drink 5 of before you realize you've drank way too many. We also ordered their Dough Buds which are their version of garlic knots and I got a half cheese half pepperoni and bacon pizza.
I realized as I started to blog that my pizza philosophy weighs heavily on that "Holy Trinity" being done right. So I made a decision for my readers that going forward I would always get half cheese and half of what I like so I can accurately assess the crust, sauce and cheese.
After we ordered we sat at one of the picnic tables and got to chat an enjoy the nice weather. When I mentioned earlier that people would sit and wait for these pizzas, I got to see it first hand. I saw people that ordered their food before us, sit in their car and wait for a half an hour before they were called to pick up their order. By the time we were done with our food, people were "fighting" for parking and it had only been 90 minutes since they had opened. But after eating the food, I was not surprised.
Let's start with the Dough Buds. This was just a fantastic way to kick off the feast. I can only assume how they make them, but it looked like they would take dough, form it into a bread stick and then cut them into 1 inch pieces before baking them in their brick layered pizza oven. Then when they are done, we swear they had to have tossed them into a bowl with melted butter, minced garlic and some parsley and shook them until they were perfectly coated. I've been in many pizza places where they just brush the top with a garlic butter and then cook it, but these were completely covered.
Man were these good. The buds were perfectly cooked on the outside and pillowy soft on the inside.
We did get a pizza sauce to dip them in, which didn't have any distinct flavor for me, but I honestly liked that because I was just enjoying the buttery garlic. I really didn't even need a dipping sauce they were so good on their own.
Now let's get to the best part, the 'za. So as soon as I opened the box I could tell it was gonna be good. The tell tale sign was the "cheese grease". It's that shiny orange liquid that sits on the top of the pizza. The kind of stuff your friend dabs off with a paper towel because they either hate good flavor or they think it will cut down on their consumption of fats (insert dramatic eye roll). As soon as I bit into the just-cheese side of the pizza, I found that my assumptions were correct. But let's start from the bottom.
The pizzas all come in one size which is a 12 inch rectangle. Based on the photos I saw online, I was expecting a cross between hand stretched and pan, but I was surprised by how thin is was. That makes it sound like it was a thin crust which it was not. I would say it was slightly thinner than a hand tossed crust, and the best part is that it did not flop when you picked up a slice. It had a nice buttery taste and was neither crunchy or soft, it was like this odd in between that I don't think I've experienced, but I was all about it. #CrustGaveMeLife.
The sauce was great as well, and they hit the perfect amount for me. The sauce had a sweetness to it that I don't experience too often at other pizza places. I either find really sweet sauces, more acidic or just bland sauces, but this again like everything else just reached that perfect in between for me.
The cheese was the bomb dot com! I already mentioned the "cheese grease" which I recently learned is actually the butter fats from the cheese. Apparently, under the right conditions, the cheese releases it's butter fats when cooked and that is the orange liquid you see floating on the top of your pizza. It can also come from other toppings when the fats cook out as well. But the fats are what give you the flavor baby! Imagine how bland your steaks or you bacon would be without a little fat to provide some flavor. I don't care who you are, turkey bacon is terrible and it's because it has barely any fat to give it flavor.
I'm getting off on a tangent though. Again the cheese had that sweet buttery and salty finish, it was fresh and did not require the garlic salt shaker. I can't stop saying how this pizza did everything right by me. And the toppings just added a little extra oomph to what was already the perfect pizza.
The pepperoni had the pep and the bacon was so fresh and nicely chopped. The bacon alone was in this oddly satisfying in between where it tasted like bacon, but also like pulled pork at the same time.
I honestly don't know what kind of forbidden magic is happening in that pizza kitchen, but this is definitely a place that I am excited to visit again and again.
If you live anywhere in Indy, you NEED to give this place a try. I can honestly say out of all the places we've blogged about so far, this is definitely my favorite. The owner was so great and I really want great things for her. I know she wants to expand so she can provide these delicious pizzas to more people in Indy and I have a feeling she is going to have no problem accomplishing that goal.
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