From Europe, Lessons on Frying Pizza
By PETE WELLS
THE most surprising thing about the montanara, a fried pizza that in less than a year has found a niche in New York’s crowded pizza ecosystem, is that Americans needed to import the idea from Europe.

If a food is commonly eaten in the United States, somebody somewhere has attempted to cook it in hot oil. Americans have deep-fried Twinkies, salads, candy bars and caviar. Last year, the Wisconsin State Fair gave the world deep-fried butter.
Pizza has not escaped this fate. Yet this American approach to frying has, I’m obliged to say, lacked the finesse that was necessary to invent the montanara. American-fried pizza tends to be batter-dipped, which certainly gets the job done but doesn’t produce something you’d choose to eat unless you were at a state fair, and even then it wouldn’t start to sound like a good idea until you’d had a couple of deep-fried beers. (They do that in Wisconsin, too.) The montanara isn’t battered. Technically, it might not be considered a fried pizza. The only part that is fried is the wheel of dough, which spends a fast but influential minute or so in hot oil before the sauce, cheese and so forth is applied on top. At that point, the whole thing is sent to the oven to bake like any other pizza.

The use of frying is subtle, and for that kind of refinement, America needed the Italians, who have been quietly frying pizza dough in Naples for years before anyone noticed.
At the onset of its American invasion, the montanara made landfall at Forcella, opened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last June by a pizza man from Naples named Giulio Adriani. ..