Delfini Citta's New York Neapolitan In LA | Beverly Hills, Los Angeles

The days of Los Angeles being a wasteland of bad pizza are long behind us.

With Neapolitan-style wood-burning ovens dotting the restaurant landscape, you can now find imitators of Naples' platonic pie throughout the city.

Hunting for a good New York-style slice, however, is still largely futile.

Delfini Città, the newly opened Beverly Hills restaurant run by the owners of Caffé Delfini in the Pacific Palisades, splits the difference between the two styles. The crust has that soft, airy texture favored by the likes of 800 Degrees, but the bottom has a good crunch to it, the texture reminiscent of the slice you'd order in Brooklyn that's served after a quick turn in the oven.

The Margherita ($13), topped with grated cheese rather than the globs of fresh mozzarella you may have become accustomed to, looks far more New York than Naples, too. But because buffalo-milk-cheese-topped and raw-greens-scattered pizzas are the new normal in our Naples-fetishizing times, Delfini Città delivers on that front as well.

Augmented with a squeeze of lemon courtesy of the wedge affixed to our water glass, the rucola-and-mozzarella pie (pictured; $13) balanced America's crust and Italy's toppings wonderfully.

Delfini Citta, 8635 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills; 310-659-9555 or delfinicitta.com