Deluca's Pizza

"The most remarkable pizza was a last-minute find, not on our original travel agenda. After enjoying a 102-degree soak but before the best massage of our lives, my travel companion looked at the local magazines arranged in the waiting room of the Quapaw Bathhouse and saw a write-up naming Deluca’s Pizzeria as one of the best restaurants in town. As a visitor from Dallas, where I edit Eater Dallas, I made the rookie mistake of trying to reserve a table — it was unnecessary; they didn’t take table reservations. The staff did inform us, however, of the the reservation we needed to make: The restaurant makes a limited amount of dough in-house each day, and the restaurant closes once they’ve run out. Reserving our dough helped to ensure we got a pizza at all. It was worth the reservation. The crust is light, New York-style and fired in a brick oven at high temperatures. Ours had those flecks of burnt crust that you want. We ordered a pie that was half Sarah Meadows, covered with garlic, chile flakes, oregano, and basil, and half seasonal produce, including arugula and peppadews peppers, and jalapenos. The proprietor, Anthony Valinoti, opened the place a decade ago after years of living in Brooklyn, where he fell in love with New York pizza, and then Vegas, Miami, and California, where he was unable to find a decent dupe. Upon moving to Hot Springs, he just made that dupe himself and started selling it in a restaurant named after his grandfather. There’s a little something special in Deluca’s new-ish location (it moved to a larger space next door to its previous location earlier in the year): Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher’s bar. The maximalist piece creates a bar area in a corner of the restaurant where folks stop by to grab a beer, cocktail, and sometimes, a whole pie. It was a gift from James Beard Award-winning chef John Currence, and it adds a certain ambiance to an unexpectedly great pizzeria in a town with a lot of strangely glamorous history." - Courtney E. Smith