Truly Pizza

If you’re in northern Orange County and looking for an artisanal pizza, recently opened pizzerias Slice House and Sugo offer good to great slices with distinctive ingredients and crusts, but it’s harder to find similar options in south Orange County. Opened in 2023 in Dana Point, Truly Pizza specializes in two types of pizza – 12-inch “light as a feather” squares or 12-inch “crispy airy hearth-baked” diameter circles, each made with dough that has fermented for three days prior to baking. As a result, the crusts are halfway between thin and thick, blistered with small bubbles at the edges and larger air pockets inside that some people (especially artisanal bread fans) will like more than others.

One surprise with the two-page, single-sided menu (omitting a page of beverages, including wines) is that the 15 pizzas are hard-divided – eight are round, and seven are square – and you can’t order, say, the “Sweet & Spicy” (soppressata, stracciatella, and hot honey) as round. As a result, four of the 15 pizzas are really just square or round versions of the same “original cheese” or “classic pepperoni” recipes, and a fifth is a margherita-style “champion cheese,” leaving 10 more distinctive alternatives ranging from white and vegetarian pizzas to riffs on classic American ‘supreme’ pizzas, spinach and artichoke, meatball and hot peppers, and sausage/onion/peppers. Handfuls of starters (four), salads (three), and sandwiches (five) are also available.

We started by ordering two supposedly must-try starters: a plump mini-pan of garlic pull-apart bread ($12) that was a little light on garlic flavor but heavy on grated romano cheese, and a really delicious “picnic plate” ($25) with four pieces of olive oil-drizzled focaccia, sliced ham, cheeses, pistachios, and almonds. Given that Truly Pizza’s pizzas have doughy crusts, we realized when the pizzas arrived that we’d made a mistake ordering items with more bread; in retrospect, the garlic bread was entirely unnecessary.