After spending time at the Weisman Art Museum one day last week I was hungry… and being not far from The Market at Malcolm Yards I thought of Wrecktangle Pizza… but I wanted to try something different. Our foodie city has so many wonderful restaurants I called John and told him I was coming to pick him up and asked him to find us a new pizza restaurant. He found wonderful Boludo!
Boludo calls itself “A Taste of Buenos Aires in Mpls”… where the chef grew up learning to cook next to his grandmother. Star Tribune restaurant critic Rick Nelson described it well… “THE TALENT BEHIND BOLUDO IS MAKING PIZZAS THAT ARE UNLIKE ANY OTHER IN THE TWIN CITIES.”
It’s a small restaurant where you order at the counter. Be prepared to wait about 20 minutes for them to make it fresh, but it is well worth the wait! The high stacks of takeout boxes were an indication of how much takeout business they do. While we were there many customers came in to pick up their takeout pizzas, and a couple was eating empanadas, which Rick Nelson also called exceptional. “The empanadas are equally enthralling. The dough is, of course, spot-on. So often these little pies can be deadly dull, but not here . . . No wonder nearly 500 are flying out the door on busy days.”
When I try a new restaurant I usually ask what they recommend. Without hesitation they said their most popular pizza was pepperoni, but recommended the CAMPO (argentinian chorizo, mushroom, onion, mozzarella, san marzano tomatoes). That’s what we got and it was amazing!!
The whole pizza was fabulous, but what struck me most was the crust… and I had to learn more. Rick Nelson was a StarTribune food critic who was also a James Beard award winner so he knows his stuff. He called described it like this…
I can’t rave enough about these pizzas. The dough, fashioned from unbleached flour and a bit of cornmeal and stretched into a rough ovoid shape, is an ingenious combination of crackers-meets-pizza crust-meets bread. It forms a foundation that holds up to a pile-on of ingredients but still manages to maintain a tender chewiness that tiptoes toward crispness.
Baked to a dark golden brown, the hearty outer edges magically puff up and often form hollow, delicate blisters. Defraia takes two crucial post-oven steps, brushing those edges with olive oil and then liberally sprinkling them with twinkling flakes of Maldon sea salt, the kind that pops in your mouth. This is a dough that’s destined for greatness.
Rick Nelson, StarTribune
‘‘CHE’’ Facundo DeFraia, first came to the Twin Cities to help his childhood friend, James Beard award nominee, Daniel Del Prado, in opening Martina. Rick Nelson calling DeFraia a “dough whisperer” encouraged him to open his own restaurant, and his first restaurant opened in the Kingfield neighborhood in 2018. They now have four restaurants in Minneapolis. We went to the Uptown location, on the quiet stretch of Girard just south of the Lagoon Theaters.
We have already been back… to try the PERAS pizza, with pear, gorgonzola, pine nuts, dill. We will have to try the empanadas next… lot of reasons to visit Boludo again and again… it’s my new favorite pizza restaurant… because of the perfect crust! I understand why it was a Best Restaurants winner in the 2023 Mpls St Paul magazine reader’s poll.
BOLUDO UPTOWN – 2935 Girard Ave S Minneapolis, MN, 55408
Sharlene Hensrud, RE/MAX Results – shensrud@homesmsp.com
