“Anomalia” might be a mouthful. But so are the pizzas in the display case at Anomalia Pizza, the New York-style slice shop that opened last month across from the Fort Washington SEPTA rail station, in what had been Little Italy for two decades.
The thin-crusted, 18-inch rounds are generously topped, though the crispy, sturdy bottoms can stand up to all the blistered cherry tomatoes, mozzarella, and olive oil layered atop the bruschetta pie, for example. Red pepper pesto gives sweet balance to the ribeye, Cooper Sharp, and caramelized onions on the Italian Stallion. Close your eyes and take a bite of the plain red-sauce pizza, and you could almost believe you’re in Brooklyn and not a mile off of Route 309 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The world needs to know about Anomalia’s drunken grandma, a crispy, almost buttery-bottomed square topped with fresh mozzarella and ribboned with a thick, creamy vodka sauce amped with pancetta. Other hits include the stromboli and the uncommon mozzarella in carrozza — basically, a mozzarella stick in sandwich form (cheese tucked inside bread, crusted with bread crumbs, and fried).
There are no actual sandwiches for now.
The owners, Long Island native Deena Fink and Florida-born Frank Innusa, had a classic meet-cute: An opera singer, she went to New York University to study musical theater, and he moved to Manhattan to become an actor. They met while working at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square, she tending bar and he waiting tables.
“Oh, you’re an actor?” Innusa said, parroting a joke that probably dates to vaudeville. “What restaurant?”
“Most actors get out of the business when they land a TV show,” said Innusa, 40, as he topped a plain pie last week while a gaggle of kids from nearby Germantown Academy awaited their orders. “I kind of fell out of love with acting — and fell in love with restaurants.”
He and Fink were married in 2018 and a year later moved to Florida for a change of pace. Innusa enrolled in a motorcycle-mechanics program, but COVID-19 made hands-on training impossible. “I still had to pay full tuition,” he said. “So I stopped — and that’s when I really started cooking.”
Cooking, he said, became an obsession. “I’d wake up thinking about it and go to sleep thinking about it,” he said. “I hadn’t felt that since acting.”
Innusa’s father had made pizzas and calzones at home, but with social-distancing restrictions in place, the fascination stuck. “He was reading the books, watching the videos, testing dough,” Fink said. “So much dough testing.”
Innusa filled a notebook with flavor combinations and textures, she said. That experimentation now shows up as Anomalia’s “pizza of the week.”
Back in New York after the pandemic, Innusa got his first pizzeria jobs at King Umberto and West End Pizza on Long Island, while Fink, now 33, managed and performed at the Duplex, the West Village cabaret where she performed years before.
Rather than add to the roster of New York pizzerias, they looked toward Philadelphia, which had long appealed to them as “a smaller city with a big food scene,” Fink said. “Fifteen minutes outside the city, there are trees and deer. That balance really drew us.” They moved to Chestnut Hill, and Fink took a job nearby at Chestnut Hill Brewery at the Market at the Fareway.
Their original 10-year plan for Anomalia was a food truck, but they learned that the owners of Chicko Tako, the market’s Korean-fusion stand, were selling their other business, Little Italy.
Innusa said wanted to name the shop Anomalisa, after the 2015 movie. “But Deena said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’’’ Innusa said. She suggested anomalia, Italian for “anomaly” and pronounced “a-nom-a-leah.”
“We want to be different from the norm, not the usual,” Innusa said.
Anomalia Pizza, 414 S. Bethlehem Pike, Fort Washington, 215-628-3845, . Hours: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday.