“Welcome, darlin’,” came the greeting from behind the large horseshoe bar at Fortunate Son, a “beer garden and New Haven-style pizza house” in Garland, Texas, just outside Dallas. A stained glass window reminiscent of a Mondrian hung horizontally overhead, and customers were spread out enough that I couldn’t much eavesdrop on the local color—or casually lean over and ask locals their opinion of what the menu here calls “a’pizza.”
Soon enough, of course, I had my own to try. Everything is bigger in Texas, they say, and in the case of my pie—a vegan version of a large plain cheese, here called The Basic ($26)—Fortunate Son held true to its home, serving up a pizza that was probably two feet at its widest. But it also held mostly true to ours, serving an oblong pizza sliced in that harried New Haven way, the bottom crust thin, crispy, chewy and charred, albeit not as heavily as at home, with a hint of sourdough funk and a whisper of cereal sweetness. The San Marzano sauce was bright and tangy, like it’s supposed to be, though I wished there had been more of it.
I hadn’t previously eaten good pizza in Texas, not that I’d tried a lot of it. One bar claimed to have modeled its pies, purportedly voted the best in Dallas at some point, after a style the bartender credited to Rhode Island, which I hoped in the ordering he had simply mistaken for Connecticut. Whatever it was that eventually appeared, I didn’t recognize and wouldn’t recommend it.
But thanks to a respect for the time-tested lessons of New Haven, Fortunate Son is not only the best Texan pizza I’ve had but great pizza, period. A companion who tried a small order of The Original ($12), styled after a New Haven tomato pie down to the grated Pecorino Romano, said it reminded him of Pepe’s, one of Fortunate Son’s primary inspirations alongside (you guessed it) Sally’s.
There were no New Haven beers in this garden, sadly, but there was a 7.5% IPA from Tampa, Florida, that rang a bell: the Cigar City Jai Alai, named after an obscure sport longtime locals will know used to have a strangely strong foothold in Milford before retreating to its greatest American stronghold in (maybe you also guessed it) Florida. The beer was mild on the hops and nicely sweet for an oddly easygoing IPA experience.
As closing time approached, head chef Richard Gaiser, a.k.a. “Chef Floyd,” came over and mentioned that, before the grand opening a little over a year ago, he and the rest of Fortunate Son’s kitchen and managerial crew had traveled to New Haven for a tasting tour to better understand the tricks of the trade—especially the “slowly fermented sourdough crust,” as the menu puts it. He said he hopes someday to go as heavy as New Haveners do on the char, once more Texans have acclimated to the joys of “well-done” pizza.
In the meantime, I wager, pizza done well will more than do.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
