Unchained Melody

Besides pizza, Dewey's makes only salads and calzones. (A trio of cakes for dessert -- usually carrot, chocolate and cheese -- comes from Cravings in Webster Groves and/or Hank's Cheesecake in Richmond Heights.) It's crazy how much lip service is paid -- both by staff and customers -- to Dewey's five oversize signature salads, but it's also right-on. Each begins on beds of top-quality field greens and/or romaine, which then are studded with offbeat ingredients like pine nuts, dried cranberries, whole garlic cloves and candied walnuts, dressed up with a bit of cheese (goat, Parmesan, feta or Gorgonzola) and coated with a house-made dressing. The wholly nontraditional Greek salad was my favorite, treated with a roasted red-pepper glaze that boasted pitch-perfect spiciness and a quartet of fat and delicious cucumber slices arrayed along the plate's edge. I was less taken by the peppercorn ranch salad: pleasant but boring, as might be expected when a salad is named after its dressing.

With so much hoopla surrounding the pizzas and salads, the calzone gets short shrift. Usually a calzone is a cheesy-goopy gluttonous good time, but Dewey's calzones are much more refined than that. That's mostly because there's much more mozzarella than ricotta stuffed inside (I'd actually like to see a bit more ricotta in there), and also because each can be filled with up to three pizza-topping ingredients. When I asked for tomatoes, I was offered a choice of sliced or diced. When I asked for mushrooms, I was offered a choice of button mushrooms or an oyster-shiitake-portobello blend. Talk about sophisticated.

Speaking of sophisticated, forget the old stereotype of teenage kids slinging pies as a part-time job. Dewey's must raid the staff at local bookstores to find its help. These are the smartest, most mature, most self-assured, most bookish-cute waiters and waitresses I've ever seen at a pizza joint. Servers aren't assigned sections or tables at Dewey's; customers are considered communal, so three or four people may take care of your table during the course of a meal, which results in some mighty attentive service.

When DeWitt opened his first Dewey's, he anticipated a heavy delivery business. But customers were so taken by the restaurant's cozy, one-room atmosphere that it quickly became known as a sit-down pizzeria. The company has never let that image lapse. All of its operations top out at under two dozen tables, always in one room. There's a cubby-size bar near the entrance in Kirkwood where grown-ups wait for a table on weekends (beware: they don't take reservations, and on Friday and Saturday nights waits can reach an hour). Children can happily pass the time watching the pizza guys through the kitchen's windows.

Dewey's had an opportunity to open up down the street from where they are, in the brand-new condo and retail development Station Plaza. But, says Justice, "We never would have signed on to go into that spot. We want to be in the older, established neighborhoods. We want the place to look good, and to have that certain energy when you walk in."

The clientele has responded, already treating Dewey's like a neighborhood place that's been around forever.