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Pizza Today magazine is fat with full-page advertisements for canned or frozen pre-mixed pizza ingredients. Dough. Sauce. Toppings. A pizzeria can buy shredded cheese in bulk, ranging from mozzarella downward through mixtures increasingly containing cheddar to a substance called "pizza cheese." This array of packaged food is the stuff that pizzas are made of at low-end parlors, where management keeps food costs to 20 percent of the retail price of a pie. You deserve better.

Most pizzerias hereabouts are run by Greeks, and traditionalists allege that the blankety-blank Greeks use cheddar in their pizzas. When Emma and Gregory Matschechelian decided to retire from the business after 29 years behind the counter at tiny, mostly take-out, Emma's Pizza, they declared that under no circumstances would they sell the place to the Greeks.

Emma's was closed for months.

Wendy Saver and David Rockwood were customers of Emma's, and like me and, I bet, all of Emma's customers, they patronized her because she sold dependably good, thin-crust pizza, and was herself dependably grouchy, if not disagreeable, a piece of work, a phenomenon. Occasionally, unaccountably, and even more remarkably she would smile and say something pleasant. Wendy and David missed her pizzas. Wendy was doing marketing for a theater, and David was working for a caterer. For a lark, they asked Emma to sell them her business. "What do you know about pizza?" Emma demanded. The answer to that, in truth, was "nothing." But neither Wendy nor David is Greek. Emma sold them the business.

David went to the Scituate, Massachusetts, public library and took out a book on pizza. He figured out how to light the oven. He made practice pizzas for local shopkeepers. They opened for business on April 19, 1995.

Their success, and it has been considerable, is owing, perhaps chiefly, to the thinness and crispiness of David's crusts. He makes dough twice a day, using a high-gluten flour, water, yeast, salt, and olive oil, in a ratio that he invented and will not disclose. Everything that goes onto a New Emma's pizza is from scratch, except for the artichokes, anchovies, and capers. Food costs are about 35 percent of the price of a pie. Standard equipment on a pizza is traditional tomato or Tuscan rosemary sauce and cow, goat, or sheep cheese. Toppings are numerous and reflect the owners' ideas of what tastes good and is healthy. David's favorite pizza: traditional sauce, feta and mozzarella cheese, red onion, fresh rosemary, hot pepper flakes. Wendy's favorite: Tuscan rosemary sauce, mozzarella and pecorino romano cheese, red onion, garlic, spinach, and prosciutto. They make, unarguably, the best pizza pies in town.

C.R.

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