Quest for Ovens: Roma Restaurant, Bar and Market, Willernie, Minnesota Field Report

Purpose of this blog

This blog will really be a true web log. I will post here about different wood-fired ovens as I find them.

If you know of any wood-fired ovens I should know about, you can send an e-mail to me. (If you build wood-fired ovens, I would like to hear from you too.)

There will lots of posts and lots of labels, since I plan to create one post for every appropriate web site that I find, and however many labels it takes to describe each one (usually at least the type of page and the location of the oven).

The accumulated information will still be found at the real Quest for Ovens web site links pages, but that is not updated as frequently as this blog will be.

If you are from outside the US and Canada, let me know what you find interesting about it. I see that I get visitors from India and Iran, and other faraway places. I'd like to know what draws you to this blog.

I received e-mail from the organizers of the BBC Two television show asking if the Saint Paul Bread Club could post a notice about their show Great British Bake-Off for amateur bakers. The information they gave me is now accessible through a link. (The organizers don't have a web page for the show itself yet.)

Please share this with any amateur bakers in Great Britain you may know, or post the link where they might see it.

Thanks.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Roma Restaurant, Bar and Market, Willernie, Minnesota Field Report

I made a lunchtime visit to the Roma Restaurant, Bar and Market, Willernie, Minnesota. They are located at 460 Stillwater Road, Willernie, MN 55090. (Note that they also have a Restaurant page on Facebook.) They are on my map of wood-fired oven businesses in Minnesota.

The outside of the building is directly in front of its narrow parking lot. From what I could see of the interior, it looks like they added the oven and expanded next door to their original location in 2008.

The oven is tucked into the front corner of the original space, back behind the counter and by the kitchen. You can barely see it from their dining room.

One can really see that this is a wood-fired oven. (A small image of one appears on their home page.) They don't really explain where the oven comes from (or why they wanted one), but it certainly does its job.

The menus for Roma Restaurant are available for downloading. I took my wife there for lunch, and we ordered the Balsamico (without the proscuitto, since we are vegetarians). Service seemed attentive and fast. My wife and I both thought it was delicious.

We found the crust to be very tender, not the hard, chewy crusts we often find with any pizzas, but especially with WFO pizzas.

There were several other pizzas on the menu we wanted to try, plus there are lots of other tasty-looking items that are not wood-fired oven pizzas.

There is a sign in their window that says they can par bake their pizzas so you can finish baking them at home. That would be an interesting option to try.

It's certainly not in our neighborhood, but if we happen to find ourselves in that corner of the Twin Cities Metro again, we will stop in for another visit.