Noto Italian Restaurant in St. Peters serves its popular pies and more for curbside pickup

×

Expand

Kevin A. Roberts

Margherita pizza

After operating a trailer serving up Neapolitan pizza, Wayne Sieve and Kendele Noto Sieve didn’t know what to expect when they opened a top-shelf Italian pizzeria in St. Peters earlier this year. It’s a long way from The Hill, nestled in a rumpled quilt of farmland and subdivisions, and even farther from Naples, where its fire-breathing oven was built.

“It was way busier than Wayne and I ever thought, especially on weekends,” says Noto Sieve. “Before the virus outbreak, we were turning the tables three to four times on Friday and Saturday, which was incredible.”

Then, in March, after restaurant dining rooms in Illinois closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Noto’s owners began strategizing. “We thought we’d try the pickup model to produce at least a small revenue stream, and, fortunately, people responded immediately,” says Noto Sieve. Customers order and pay online, then call when they arrive for curbside pickup. “Some of the customers joked that they were especially glad to see us, since they’d been unable to experience the food otherwise.”

Kevin A. Roberts

Noto’s regular menu is available, along with occasional rotating items. Naturally, pizza is the star, though house-made pastas are a powerfully potent distraction. A plate of tagliolini strings is swirled around sautéed wild mushrooms; it’s buttery, fragrant, rich. Flat disks of corzetti (a pasta with medieval origins) are greened with garlicky pesto.

A cue ball of mozzarella dominates a Caprese salad, spattered with a verdant pesto and topped with sliced tomato, halved cherry tomatoes, arugula, and just enough balsamic vinegar to give it bite. It’s a perfect prelude to dinner. The house salad is nearly as nice: Greens with artichoke chips and peppers are dressed with a light Italian herb oil.

An appetizer of “fried dough” is exactly what it sounds like: bread balls with marinara sauce. Calamari connoisseurs will be more than satisfied with the version here, topped with a drizzle of local honey that sounds odd but tastes great.

Then there’s the pizza. The crafting of a Neapolitan pizza is art, pure, exacting. The dough’s topped with a scarlet slurry of uncooked San Marzano tomatoes and a squirt of greenish olive oil with the fragrance of fresh-cut hay.

Properly, Noto maintains the distinction between pizzaiolo and fornaio. The former passes the unprocessed pie to the latter, who hustles it, using a wooden pizza peel, into the glowing furnace and shepherds it, giving the pie a quarter spin every few seconds until it emerges a masterpiece. The crust is blistered, the bottom crispy, and the rim yeasty, like new bread. It’s pizza napoletana.

Noto monkeys around with toppings—thin-sliced potato, roasted eggplant, fig jam—without going ape. There’s an emphasis on local produce. Guanciale and aged prosciutto work their magic. One pie’s finished with garlic cream sauce, artichoke, lemon, rapini, and mozzarella, another with onion jam, njuda, and Calabrese cream, a mildly spicy chili-and-pepper sauce from southern Italy.

×

Expand

Kevin A. Roberts

Caprese salad

Noto has three must-try pies. First, the bufalina—the name tantalizes—arrives loaded with melty ivory globs of imported buffalo mozzarella, basil, San Marzano tomato, olive oil, and Sicilian sea salt. Next is the simple marinara, with tomato sauce, oregano, garlic, and sea salt. And there’s the Margherita, the pie against which all others must be measured. Noto’s presentation is splendid. The mozzarella, pungent basil, and sauce work beautifully together.

There’s a modest wine list, with affordable options and some good matches for the pies. Bottles of wine are marked down to wholesale prices and available for pickup.

The biggest sellers since the restaurant began offering curbside pickup are pizzas, frozen pizzas, and family meals (which are currently offered only sporadically). “One customer came in for those three times in a single week,” says Noto Sieve. A couple even brought their own utensils and glassware and proceeded to eat in their car. “I guess they really needed a change of scenery,” she says.

“When we come out on the other side of this, Wayne and I hope to pick up right where we left off,” Noto Sieve adds. “We’re so new at this, I’m sure it’ll feel like the first day all over again.”