Order the cheese. That’s my rule at any new pizza place, and it has nothing to do with restraint.
A cheese slice has nowhere to hide. No toppings doing the heavy lifting, no clever combination to talk about instead of the dough.
Just bread, sauce, cheese and whoever made them.
At Milio’s Pizza, which opened last month at 801 State St., the cheese slice was all I had. One slice, on a warm afternoon, eaten standing at the counter with a paper plate folding under my thumb.
I’d love to report back on the rest of the menu. I can’t. But I’ve been turning that one slice over in my head for days, which is more than I can say for most of what I eat.
The crust is the thing. It arrives with that faint structural confidence a good New York slice has, sturdy enough to fold, thin enough to bend without cracking, with a bottom that carries a little char and a rim that gives before it yields.
The flavor has depth to it, something faintly sour and toasted underneath, the kind of taste that suggests time was involved rather than shortcuts.
That impression turns out to be right. Miles Robbins, who developed the dough, uses organic artisan-milled flours, both a sourdough starter and commercial yeast, and a 72-hour hybrid fermentation.
Three days of patience for something a customer eats in four minutes. That ratio tells you a lot about a kitchen.
The team also imports water from New York for the dough, which is either charming or fanatical depending on your temperament, and I confess I lean toward charming.
The water question has been argued about by pizza people for decades, and I have no interest in settling it here.
What I will say is that the choice reflects a certain seriousness, a refusal to accept “close enough” as a standard.
You can taste that seriousness in the cheese and the sauce, too. Both taste like they were bought recently from someone who cares, rather than pulled from a distributor’s catalog.
Everything on the slice tasted fresh in the plain, unglamorous sense of that word: bright sauce, cheese that pulled and browned properly, nothing dull or muted anywhere on the plate.
Milio’s comes from Robbins and Kamil Jumale, both of whom have spent real time in hospitality, most recently at Godmothers Graze in Summerland.
Before opening, they went to New York and ate their way through the city’s styles, taking notes on what actually made a slice worth remembering.
They then worked with Anthony “Pizza Czar” Falco, a pizza consultant who was among the original crew at Roberta’s in Brooklyn, to build the dough program.
Jumale and Robbins’ stated philosophy is that great pizza is not a matter of reinvention but of mastering the fundamentals unusually well.
That is a harder position to hold than it sounds. It leaves you nowhere to hide.
The room is a pleasure. It has the compact, purposeful energy of a good slice shop, warm without being fussy, designed for people who want to eat well and quickly, and then get on with their day.
There is a particular rhythm to a counter operation done right, and Milio’s has found it. People came in, ordered, waited a moment, and left looking pleased.
Two regulars had already formed in the first weeks, greeting the staff by name. That is the atmosphere Jumale and Robbins said they were after, a place where guests become regulars, and it appears to be working faster than most places manage.
I cannot speak to the rest of the menu, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But the range they are working with sounds thoughtfully assembled.
There is pepperoni alongside the cheese, a Spicy Vodka Square, and a house pie called The Milio. Sicilian squares and whole rounds are available to order.
Because Milio’s is roughly midway between the two downtown Santa Barbara Farmers Markets, the specials rotate with the seasons and lean on local farmers and artisans, which is exactly the right instinct in this town and one that a lot of restaurants claim more than they practice.
There is also soft-serve ice cream, in traditional and seasonal flavors, which strikes me as a small act of generosity toward anyone who has just eaten pizza and is not yet ready to leave.
What stayed with me most, beyond the slice, was the evident labor behind it. Opening a restaurant is a brutal undertaking, and opening one built entirely on getting simple things right is harder still, because there is no novelty to carry you through the weeks when the dough misbehaves.
The research trips, the consultant, the water, the three-day ferment, the sourcing, the room itself: all of it represents an enormous amount of care poured into an object that costs a few dollars and disappears in a handful of bites.
That care is legible. You can taste it, and you can feel it in how the place is run.
Milio’s Pizza, at 801 State St., is open noon to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, noon to 11 p.m. Friday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday, and noon to 9 p.m. Sunday. The restaurant is closed Mondays.
I will be back for the square. I hope they have a very long run.
