Making sense of Houston's new Piola and its international house of pizza ways

I'll admit it: Piola seems cool. The Keith Haring-style scribbles and multicolored lights and furniture are funky, even if they do also scream "trying really hard!" And to our knowledge they are the only pizza chain that publishes a yearly magazine of essays, photographs and art from around the world that express their culture, in food and beyond.

Piola wears its Italian heritage loudly, and it's true that the first Piola and the international headquarters are in Treviso, a small city near Venice. But Piola exists mostly in the new world, not the old, with all but two locations in Latin America and the United States.

Piola comes out swinging in its new, first-ever Houston location at 3201 Louisiana St. with a huge menu of almost 50 12-inch "individual" thin-crust pizzas, from standards like sausage and mushrooms to inventive combos like the Ragusa, with bacon rolls filled with gorgonzola cheese.

All this and there's still room on the menu for several salad options and a few appetizers, meat dishes and pastas.

We started with the bruschetta, which was disappointing — overly peppery hunks of tomato on run-of-the-mill slices of crunchy French bread.

But the sign says "famosi per la pizza" so that's what we stuck with for the most part. The best part of Piola is the mini-menu of a half-dozen white or bianco pizzas, which are a rare find in Houston. We tried the Sarajevo, a combo of smoked mozzarella, ricotta and spinach, and found the toppings plentiful, the crust nice and thin without being crispy, having a mild char on the bottom, though the top was a little greasy.

We next ordered the Regina Margherita, a Neopolitan-style pizza advertised as having more dough. Though the crust edge was different — more fluffly, like a typical American pizza — the crust otherwise seemed the same. But the toppings were incredibly skimpy — the "fresh basil" was just a few tiny strips of green strewn across the pizza. And where I come from, a margherita pizza should have fresh sliced tomatoes, not a thin coating of tomato sauce. Acceptable, but not great.

Lastly we grabbed one of the featured pizzas, the Mantova with brie, arugula, tomato and beef carpaccio, ordered with a wheat crust. I felt between the wheat and the plentiful arugula that the balance of flavor was a bit more bitter than I prefer, but others liked it more. I also thought the strips of beef were too thick to be functional as a pizza topping — prosciutto (featured on some of the other pizzas) would have been better.

Piola has free appetizers during happy hour and an unlimited gnocchi option for $13.50 on the 29th of every month. And between the Midtown location and staying open until 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday, we predict this pizza place will be getting very social.

But try as I might, I can't love it. The pizza — with the exception of the white versions — is just OK, even by Houston standards.