Fire up the pizza

Food trucks have brought Baton Rouge many new flavors, from Cuban sandwiches to Italian gelato, but Dolce Vita, the latest food truck to hit the Red Stick’s streets is a step beyond, with a wood-fired stone pizza oven built right into the back of the truck to produce perfect pizza pies every time.

Chef-owner Bogdan Mocanu’s passion for getting every detail right is clear within moments of meeting him. A graduate of the Louisiana Culinary Institute who has worked at many high-profile restaurants, including a stint at John Besh’s Domenica in New Orleans, Mocanu was working as the executive sous chef with LSU Dining and being groomed for high-profile success when he realized he just wasn’t happy with the bottom-line focus of his current career. “The job was great,” he says. “But I wanted a chance to do something truly creative. I felt I couldn’t settle down into this until I knew I had tried to do something different.”

Despite friends and family “telling me I was crazy”—the Romanian-born Mocanu had only just gotten a green card—he wrote out a business plan, sold his car, and took out a loan from the bank to start building the trailer that would eventually become Dolce Vita. It was custom-built to account for the unusual necessity of a stone oven to get just the right temperature for pizza, and Mocanu struggled with permit issues from city officials who were puzzled at the idea. Eventually, however, the truck was up and rolling, and Mocanu could start serving his pizza.

And what pizza! Mocanu is meticulous about flavor profiles and ingredients, hand picking the freshest stuff he can find and often creating custom blends of spices and cheeses to create just the right effect on the palate. Buffalo mozzarella, Parmigiano-Reggiano, fresh basil, imported Italian salamis and prosciutto—it all makes a tremendous difference in the finished product. “Where I come from, we don’t have much, we don’t have the supermarkets,” says Mocanu. “But what we have, it’s all fresh and it’s all high-quality. That’s what I’m trying to recreate here.” He uses a high-gluten dough that he makes fresh every day to create the crispy, bubbly New York-style crust, cooked directly on the brick stone of the truck’s oven. He’ll often urge customers to take their first bite in front of him so he can see their reaction and judge by that if he needs to make adjustments to the recipe.

Things started slow for Dolce Vita, but business has been picking up thanks to the weekly Food Truck Wednesday “Wroundups” and help from fellow LCI grads like Chef Colt Patin. Click here to see where Dolce Vita will be next, and click here to see a photo gallery of Mocanu working his pizza magic.—Rachael Upton