Life of Pie

Let me first apologize to anyone who was dining at Pie in the Sky Pizza in Cool Springs early Saturday evening a few weeks back. Maybe it was all the Sprite, I don't know—but our kids were nuts. They were climbing from booth to booth, touching those cool light-up disks on the walls and pressing their noses against the oversize kitchen windows. Yeesh, my critters haven't been that wound up since the last trip to the Adventure Science Center.

Or wait...come to think of it, were those my kids—or yours?

Toddlers were everywhere, and it got hard to tell. At one point I put my arm around a cuddly little blond guy who was intently watching the pizza-maker roll out dough, and I was all puckered up to kiss him on the noggin before I realized it was not my kid. So I'm sorry for that too.

But what the hell, we were all in it together at the early-bird special—booster seats, sippy cups, bibs and all—and Pie in the Sky was ready for us.

Few restaurants without a rodent for a mascot and a phalanx of ski-ball machines put on a better face for families with kids than Pie in the Sky Pizza, which will open a third location this fall in midtown. What's so impressive is that it's not a super-kitsch eatertainment racket, the kind with cardboard pizza as a loss leader sucking you into a quarter-gobbling gauntlet of video games and Whac-A-Moles. Instead, owners Kelly and Caroline Black, who have two kids of their own, have looked at pizza from the point of view of a kid as well as an adult. They've come up with a recipe for fresh, creative food and a few low-tech distractions to pass the time until the food arrives on the table.

It all started in their first store, opened in 2001, when pizza-makers flung hunks of dough to kids who stood on chairs and peered into the kitchen. So many kids ultimately fell off their chairs that when the Blacks relocated to Cool Springs, they installed kid-size bar stools and picture windows overlooking the kitchen. These days, the dough bar is as much a hallmark of Pie In the Sky as the astronauts, cherubs, spaceships, fiber-optic lights and other colorful references to celestial inspiration that adorn the stores. (As for the cool light-up disks on the wall, you might remember them from Spencer's gift stores back in the day, but Kelly now collects them on eBay. And, yes, he does want your kids to touch them. That's what they're for.)

On the Saturday night in question, I shamelessly purloined a blob of dough from one of the half-dozen kids at my table, and, I admit, I kneaded that thing with the nervous energy of a woman trying kick a pain-pill addiction. When the dough balls had grayed and lost their yeasty luster, we sent the kids toward the kitchen to watch the pizza-tossing action. As they ran across the room—and I raised a two-for-one mug of draft beer to my lips—I could almost hear the banjo strains of "Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby" from so many 9-year-old birthday parties at Shakey's Pizza circa 1980. Only this time, I was the grown-up shooing the kids away from the table.

As a grown-up, I was pleasantly surprised by the food. That's not to say that Pie in the Sky redefined Italian cuisine or set an unusually high bar for the pizzeria classics. Spaghetti with meatballs and lasagna were generously portioned and freshly made, but unremarkable. Calamari was slightly under-fried, with gooey batter oozing off some of the squid. And barbecue wings were slightly too sweet for our taste.

But the roster of ingredients—ranging from sausages shipped in from Fontanini in Chicago to walnut pesto, baby spoon spinach and sweet garlic—brought a welcome freshness to our meal. (Kelly brags that the restaurants' small freezers contain only orange juice, ice cream, shrimp and cookie dough, while the refrigerators are loaded with fresh meats, cheese and produce, including the expensive fresh-packed tomato purées.)

A songwriter with cuts by Diamond Rio, Joe Diffie and Neal McCoy, Kelly has clearly done his pizza homework. He riffs about gluten levels, heat transfer and best practices in sauces and crusts with impressive breadth of knowledge. But when it came time to revamp and expand the menu this year, Kelly turned to chef Robert MacClure, an alumnus of local culinary hot spots Acorn and Flyte.

MacClure's recipe for spicy Thai peanut pizza was the best thing we encountered at Pie in the Sky, loaded with tender sheets of garlic-roasted chicken and hunks of pineapple across a sweet-and-spicy soy-based sauce. With a salty blend of cheeses and a garnish of crisp celery chunks, the colorful combination made for a satisfying meal, though the peanut flavor was undetectable.

Less successful was the shrimp scampi pizza, which scattered big, tender shrimp and vibrant lemon wedges on a pale canvas of Romano and mozzarella cheese. While the citrus garnish made a striking impression, in the end, we squeezed a single wedge across the pie and picked off the delicious shrimp, leaving the majority of the crust, lemons and dense, dry cheese uneaten. Next time, we'll try the scampi entrée, which plates the succulent garlic-laced shrimp with fettuccine and a white-wine reduction.