Dough to Delicious

Claude Debussy famously observed that “music is the space between notes,” and that it is the breath of a piece that gives a song its resonance. It is safe to say that Geoff Smith would argue the same thing about pizza—it’s the air, the space between things that really make it pop. That’s why he doesn’t fuss over specialty ingredients or fancy sauces, because he knows that the magic is in that crunchy, fluffy crust. 

“We just use active dry yeast, that’s it,” he says. “It’s not fancy, it’s not poolish, it’s not biga, it’s just active dry yeast. Put it in warm water, bloom it, and that’s it.” He’s equally as unfussy about his tomato sauce. He recommends regular old canned tomato sauce. “Again, it’s nothing fancy, it’s just tomato sauce.” 

It’s not exactly what you would expect to hear from a chef that worked his way through his brother’s award-winning kitchen, but it is an ethos they share. A manifesto of simple food done incredibly well. 

“My brother Peyton started Mission Pizza in Winston-Salem a little over 10 years ago, and he quickly became the most renowned pizza maker in North Carolina and one of the most well known pizza makers in the country. He’s ridiculously good,” says Geoff. Indeed, if you look on any ranking list from Food & Wine to Thrillist, you’ll see Mission Pizza Napoletana listed as the cream of the crop. Chef Peyton Smith even got a nod for Best Chef Southeast in the 2022 James Beard Awards. A legacy his brother Geoff is striving to continue in his Mission Pizza expansion at Terra Nova Brewing in downtown Asheville. 

“I was living in New York, I’d been there for about 25 years doing large scale real estate development—office buildings, apartment buildings, I even built a train station,” says Geoff, who left the real estate game to help his brother with his Winston-Salem restaurant in 2021. “So this is kind of a change, but it’s also kind of the same thing. It’s just about the process. As a real estate developer, you manage a process, and it’s really the same with pizza.”

To watch his process is to watch someone who has clearly repeated the act a few thousand times. The way he eyeballs the ratios, or the way he tosses and rolls the dough, sculpting it from massive boulders down to football sized ovals, and stretches it across the pan in a fluid motion.

When Mission Pizza first opened in Asheville, they were serving classic Neapolitan style pizza—soft, thin dough with high, pillowy edges. But after the havoc of Hurricane Helene, Smith had to rethink the function of the kitchen, considering the city’s reduced labor pool and differing demands within the restaurant. That’s when he landed on a Roman-style pizza known as Pizza al Taglio, characterized by its rectangular shape and thick, focaccia-like crusts. 

He acknowledges that Roman style pizza, with its square slices and thick crust, isn’t what most people think of when they think of pizza. “It’s not your everyday pizza. People sometimes look at it and say ‘what the hell did you just give me?’” he laughs. “But they embrace it when they try it and it’s been really well received.”

MISSION PIZZA AVL
101 S Lexington Ave., Asheville
Sunday, Monday, Wednesday & Thursday noon-8 p.m.; Friday & Saturday noon-9 p.m.
missionpizzaavl@gmail.com

Get the recipes:

Mission Pizza Romana 

Soppressata & Shallot Pizza

The Better BLT Pizza