Fat Olives – Flagstaff, Arizona

Several years and a couple of tons ago, my friend “Macho” Mike Moretti and I were the type of trenchermen that all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurants feared so much they established strict time limits.  When a German restaurant on San Mateo offered a free dessert to any diner who could finish a gargantuan combination plate, we easily surmounted the challenge and asked for seconds.  Perhaps our most impressive culinary conquest transpired when Pizza Inn offered a “order one pizza, get the next size free” deal.  We ordered an extra large pizza and a large pizza then polished them off.  That was the last time I ever finished at least an entire pizza (about ten acres of pie) by myself.  That is, the last time until my Kim and I paid an inaugural visit to Fat Olives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

No ordinary pizza will you find at Fat Olives.  The pizza for which I scaled the heights of gluttony placed third in the International Pizza Expo in 2014.  That event hosts the largest assembly of pizzaiolo in the world.  Its prestigious pizza-making competition in North America, if not the world.  Third place places Fat Olives in rarefied air.  Furthermore, Fat Olives is a Verace Pizza Napoletana (VPN) certified pizzeria which means it adheres to strict age-old principles in the art of making true Neapolitan Pizza.  Fat Olives has acquired D.O.C.(Dennomiazione di Origine Controllata) status, which specifies the legally permitted ingredients and methods of preparation necessary to provide authentic Neapolitan Pizza. Only four pizzerias in Arizona have this certification.

Fat Olive’s oven (pictured below) was handcrafted in Italy by the Valoriani family, 5th generation oven builders.  The restaurant uses only imported organic, non-GMO, San Marzano D.O.P tomatoes for its pizza sauce.  Its “00” imported flour is also organic and GMO-free. Using the finest cheese curd and Sicilian sea salt, Fat Olives hand-makes over 500 pounds of Fior de latte (mozzarella) every week.  Ingredients of the highest quality, attention to detail and strict adherence to standards established by exports, is it any wonder I wiped out an entire pizza.  More on this prolific pie below…

Fat Olives might conceivably have remained a well-kept secret known only by locals and foodies until Food Network glitterati Guy Fieri brought his Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives program to Flagstaff.  The menu pays homage to the spike-coiffured star with a blurb extolling “What Guy Ate.”  For the record, Fieri had a Kenai pizza (white base, house-made mozzarella, pecorino Romano, and house-smoked salmon, which is a Copper River Delta salmon brined in water, Sicilian sea salt, and brown sugar, then smoked with hickory chips. The pizza is finished with fresh dill, red onion, and a house-made dill cream. Our server told us Fieri followers (Guy’s gang) tend to order what he had. I sure was tempted–not because Fieri had the Kenai pizza, but out of respect for Wolfgang Puck who pioneered salmon on pizza.

Three pizzas on the menu are categorized as “Verace Pizza Napoletana.”  All pizza can be made gluten-free.  Twelve add-ons are available should the pizza you want isn’t sufficiently adorned.  There are thirteen pizzas listed on the “Pizza Classica” section of the menu, including an adovada pizza which placed fifth in the International Pizza Expo.  That makes two Fat Olives pizzas to garner acclaim at the most prestigious pizza competition in the world.  As you peruse the menu, you’ll quickly determine there’s much more than pizza…and there are diners who aren’t as passionate about pizza as yours truly.

Also on the menu are five items on the Insalata + La Zupa (Salad and Soup) section of the menu. Four of them are salads while the one soup is a house-made tomato-basil bisque. Eight items are listed in the “Antipasti” section. It’s tempting to order two (or eight) of those starters and consider that your entree. Five bruschetta boards, every one of them showcasing myriad ingredients, might also tempt you.  As if all of this embarrassment of riches isn’t enough, the menu also lists Pasta + Lasagna.  If you can’t visit Fat Olives regularly, you might curse the pizza for being so good that you might never enjoy this seven-item section.

8 August 2026: Though all the Antipasti are enticing, your not-always-humble blogger recommends the wood-fired stracciatella a creamy, warm appetizer made with house-made mozzarella and ricotta, topped with a honey balsamic reduction and cracked pepper, and served with house-made crostini. It is finished with a drizzle of olive oil and can be optionally enhanced with Prosciutto di Parma.  Stracciatella means “little rags” in Italian and refers to three different foods: a creamy soft cheese, an egg drop soup, and a chocolate-chip-like gelato flavor. Our favorite stracciatella as a cheese comes from Fat Olives.  Our favorite stracciatella as a gelato comes from Sexy Roman in Scottsdale. Fat Olives’ cheesy dish is a rich and savory appetizer where the wood-fired cooking melts the cheeses together for a decadent starter.  It may ruin all other Antipasti for you.  Even as our arteries hardened, my Kim and I worked diligently to scrape every bit of the melted molten cheese from the bowl.

8 August 2026: The pizza that won my heart is the Belgio Dolce (a creative, thin-crust pizza with a white cream sauce base, house-made mozzarella, Pecorino Romano, soppressata, and shaved brussel sprouts marinated in Calabrian chili oil. It is finished with crushed pistachios, a drizzle of local honey, and more chili oil for a spicy-sweet flavor profile.  The name Belgio Dolce translates loosely from Italian to “sweet Belgium.” it combines elements meaning “sweet” (dolce), which reflects the signature flavor profile of the pie balancing local honeyed sweetness against savory and spicy elements.  This pizza is imbued with magic as well as a multifarious flavor profiles: spicy and savory (soppressata and Calabrian chili oil), sweet and nutty (honey and pistachios), and rich and creamy (white sauce and mozzarella). Thanks to the Pecorino Romano and the brussel sprouts, you can add umami and earthiness to the complex flavors that bless this pizza.

18 October 2025: My Kim is one of those weird people who can visit a pizzeria and order a salad.  Aargh!  Why did I marry her?  In her defense, that was no ordinary salad she had.  Fittingly, it’s called Fat Olives (organic greens, goat cheese, dried currants, cranberries, candied pecans, red onions, lemon balsamic vinaigrette).  Though olives aren’t a standard ingredient on this salad, you can always order marinated oven-roasted olives from the Antipasti section of the menu. Then you can add them as you please…or better still, enjoy some of the beauteous briny gems.  This salad is large enough to constitute an annual allotment of greens for some people.  It’s humongous.  My Kim finished less than half of the salad and nearly wept that we couldn’t take it home.

23 October 2025:  Perform a Google search for “Italian grandmothers try Olive Garden for the first time” and the resultant returns are hilarious.  Some Italian grandmothers held nothing back in their assessment of such Olive Garden favorites as bread sticks (“looks like a skinny d**k”), eggplant Parmesan (“what kind of sh*t is this?”) and lasagna (one grandmother was so appalled she didn’t even want to try it).  Other Italian grandmothers were more gracious and kind.  At least one grandmother even liked some of Olive Garden’s dishes.  I wondered what those nonnas would have thought of Fat Olives signature lasagna.

Our server, the effusive Matty, actually told us we wouldn’t regret ordering any of Fat Olives’ pasta dishes instead of pizza.  She indicated most guests rave about the lasagna which is made with a ten-hour ragu, ricotta, mozzarella-Provolone blend, grana padano and a basil chiffonade.  This lasagna is served in a casserole dish and doesn’t appear to have the layered appearance of traditional American-Italian lasagna.  Several features stand out about this lasagna.  First is the cheese blend, an extraordinary blend of three cheeses that most assuredly go very well together.  Second is the ragu, an Italian meat-based sauce, slow-cooked (for ten hours) in a tomato sauce. I could bathe in that elixir.   Third is the basil chiffonade, thin slices of Italian basil.  Frankly, every aspect of this lasagna is first-rate.  It’s among the very best restaurant lasagna I’ve had outside of the Boston area.

23 October 2025:  My favorite of all Italian pastas is rigatoni, a tube-shaped pasta with a wide, hollow interior and a ridged outer surface, making it excellent for capturing sauces.  In all honesty, it’s not the flavor or texture that makes it my favorite pasta. It’s the ease with which it can be speared with a fork or even picked up with a spoon.  It’s no secret among friends and family that my gigantic hands are better at destroying things than at creating things (other than words).  My mom recognized I had the brains to become a doctor, but not the deft, gentle hands to perform surgery.

Fat Olives’ rigatoni (ten-hour ragu, mozzarella-Provolone blend, fennel sausage, basil chiffonade, cream) is superb!   The portion size is gigantic, far more than my Kim could finish.  Thankfully, it reheated well and as with so many Italian dishes, was even better the following day when the ragu really seeps into the pasta.  My Kim’s love of fennel sausage (the type of which she grew up with in Chicago) is well known to frequent readers.  Unlike some Italian restaurants, Fat Olives doesn’t slice sausage into chunks which are strewn indiscriminately into a pasta dish.  Instead, the fennel sausage is part of the ragu which means its influence and deliciousness are more pronoiunced.

8 August 2026: Culinary history credits chef Raffaele Esposito with having created the Margherita pizza in 1889 for Queen Margherita of Savoy during her visit to Naples. It was one of three pies baked for her. Before becoming a royal treat, flatbread pizzas were cheap meals for the poor inhabitants of Naples. While visiting Naples, the queen grew tired of fancy French meals and asked to try local, simple foods. The toppings—tomatoes (red), mozzarella (white), and basil (green)—matched the Italian flag. The queen loved the patriotic combination so much that her head of service even sent a written letter of appreciation.

Today, The Margherita pizza is widely considered the most popular and iconic pizza variety in the world, topping international rankings as the quintessential Italian dish. Neapolitan chefs began using buffalo mozzarella (mozzarella di bufala) around the late 18th to the 19th century. This exquisite cheese is made from the milk of the Italian Mediterranean water buffalo (a very distant relative of the American bison), Sadly, buffalo mozarella is still a novelty in the United States. You can find it at Fat Olives in the form of a Bufalo Margherita (San Marzano tomato, D.O.P imported mozzarella di bufala, D.O.P fresh basil, EVOO). Margherita pizza tends to bore me, but when constructed with mozarella bufala, it awakens my taste buds. Bufala mozzarella is much richer, creamier, and tangier than regular cow’s milk mozzarella. It features a distinct milky sweetness balanced by a pleasant, earthy acidity and a slight, savory gaminess. My only complaint (and it’s a nit) is that there should be even more of this outstanding cheese on an outstanding pizza.

Fat Olives has been listed among the Food Network’s “Top Places to Eat.”  It was ranked 35th on Yelp’s 2023 list of “Top 100 places for pizza.  It’s consistently named not only Flagstaff’s best Italian restaurant, but best restaurant regardless of genre.  It’s reason enough to visit Flagstaff…or maybe to move there.

Fat Olives
2308 E. Route 66
Flagstaff, Arizona
(928) 853-0056
Website | Facebook Page
LATEST VISIT: 08 August 2026
1st VISIT 18 October 2025
# OF VISITS: 3
RATING: Outstanding–A stand-out; delivers a memorable dining experience through a harmonious blend of exceptional food, attentive service, and consistent quality
COST: $$$ – $$$$
BEST BET: Tiramisu, Cannoli, Fat Olives Salad, Belgio Dolce Pizza, Wood-Fired Stacciatella, Rigatoni, Fat Olives Signature Lasagna, Bufala Margharita
REVIEW #1492