Mamma Flores pie

Mamma Flora’s

Mamma Flora's Trattoria, 1750 N Olden Avenue, Ewing, NJ
M-Th 11AM - 10PM; F-Sa 11AM - 10PM; Su 12PM - 9PM
(609) 434-1188   Website    Google Maps

Mamma Flora’s (“MF’s”) is the kind of place that drives contest judges nuts. We’ve been there 4 separate times. On two occasions, we’ve had pies and service that were up there with the best in the competition… we had MF’s challenging for the overall win (which is why we kept going back). However, we also had 2 other visits: one terrible (way undercooked), and one mediocre (burnt on one side, dried out lip, but soggy in the center). We’ve given up and made MF’s a semi-finalist. For what it’s worth, our good experiences were at lunch. Our bad experiences weekday dinners, late. Perhaps it explains why people who are deeply obsessive about tomato pie track the individual pie-men* and only go to restaurants when they know their favorite guys are working.

Mamma Flora’s has a gas-fired, stone oven (no metal surfaces touch the pie). When properly made and timed, it delivers a crispy crust without drying out the lip. Even on our best pies, there was the slightest hint of doughyness, and not a lot of char, so perhaps these were still slightly undercooked. But overall, it can be one of the best crusts (and most delicious lips) of any pie in the competition. The other ingredients are consistently as good as the best: the mozzarella is very stringy and very tasty. The tomato is intense and perfectly balanced. Superb mushrooms: Mamma’s marinates its fresh mushrooms in extra-virgin olive oil and spices. They cook on top of the pie, but they seem to release less water than un-marinated mushrooms and deliver a more complex flavor. Service has also ranged from excellent (2x) to mediocre to terrible.

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*I would normally write “and pie-women”, but I’ve never had a woman-tossed tomato pie, I don’t think.