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According to Paper City Magazine, Houston-Dallas, Texas (USA) Renatos ovens are:
"THE PORSCHE TURBO-CHARGE OF THE WOODBURNING BRICKOVENS!!!..."

Troy Aikman, ex Dallas Cowboy Super Bowl winning Quarterback, and Sport Personality Star...
"THE MICHELANGELO OF THE BRICK PIZZA OVENS"

Man. Fire. Meat.

That may be why I was so intrigued with "Il Forno," the ceramic, wood-fired oven used by the chefs at The Garlic restaurant in New Smyrna Beach. I was drawn to its warmth on a recent rainy visit, but became enamored of the ways of the Brotherhood as the chefs, my husband, and restaurant owner Jeff Gehris engaged in a deep, methodological study of the cooking practices on this wood-fired oven.

"The comment we get the most is 'Oh, this is a pizza oven.' Wood ovens aren't just for pizza anymore," he says.

Il Forno has an Italian lineage -- it was forged by Renatos of Texas, whose founder, Renato Riccio of Tuscany, Italy, considers it his calling to bring this style of cooking to America.

The prices for the commercial wood-burning ovens range from $10,700 to about $16,484. Groebner says that Europeans consider this style of cooking the only way to cook a steak.
However, the oven isn't just for meat. Fish is seared on cedar oak planks. Brie cheese is blanketed in puff pastry and baked. Chops, chicken and vegetables also explode with flavor when they exit Il Forno and enter your mouth.

I sampled a tomato that had been kissed by the flames of Il Forno... a simple dish that delighted with the heat of a thousand suns bursting from the juices.

"Delicioso!" I think. My eyes roll toward the heavens, my mouth refuses to open to let anything interfere with this experience. I nod my head vigorously.

While Il Forno could probably make a shoe delicious, it's meat that is displayed front and center to entice customers to worship at the oven's feet.

"The meat's incredible," Perri whispers reverently. "It's a beautiful thing."

Chef Francesco Farris entertains
at home, too.

By Paige Phelps
8:21 PM CDT on Saturday, April 12, 2008

Word to the wise: If Francesco Farris asks you to dinner at his 1940s Bluffview bungalow, say yes, cancel everything and get there as fast as you can.

When it comes to entertaining, Mr. Farris, executive chef at Arcodoro & Pomodoro in Dallas, does not cut corners. His impromptu, everyday dinners are legendary. And on a perfect Monday night in early spring, with birds in the trees and the temperature hitting 80 degrees, Mr. Farris, a native Sardinian, lit his cigarette, let it dangle from his mouth and began cooking for his handful of guests.

The menu this night? Nothing short of a masterpiece: penne pasta with mushrooms sautéed with basil and rosemary; tender, grilled Berkshire pork chops; New Zealand snapper grilled inside a shell of sea salt; a caprese salad with buffalo mozzarella; and, of course, his pizza, prepared with a secret Farris sauce and homemade dough, and fired with mesquite and oak woods inside his handmade brick Renato Oven. The oven was made by Italian craftsman Renato Riccio in Garland, and it's the same brand of oven that is used at the restaurant. The oven can reach 700 F and, at that heat, it only takes a few minutes for the pizza to reach perfection: slightly charred on the bottom, but still soft and gooey on top.

It is Mr. Farris' pride and joy, this oven.

"Renato built the shell but everything else is with my hands," Mr. Farris says of his concrete and mud oven stand, the centerpiece of his back yard. "I mixed the mud together with some gold -- that's real gold by the way, real gold paint," he says with a laugh.

But if you think Mr. Farris is just putting on a show for guests, you're wrong, says Matt Ruibal, who owns Ruibal's Plants of Texas and who is one of Mr. Farris' guests this evening.

Photos by WILLIAM DESHAZER Staff Photographer Pizza, chicken and other dishes cooked outdoors await guests at chef Francesco Farris' home.

"I'll come out to landscape and he'll have opened a bottle of wine and then later it's 'now it's time to eat,' and he'll have pasta and steaks. And if you try to leave he says, 'No, one more [glass], stay, stay, stay,' " Mr. Ruibal says.

No wonder Mr. Farris has such an affinity for his friend the gardener, for Mr. Farris grows his own artichokes, sunflowers and tomatoes along with marjoram, rosemary and thyme.

But his favorite is the myrtle he grows; he takes the berries and leaves and creates a traditional Sardinian after-dinner liqueur called mirto.

Myrtle is a very important herb in the Mediterranean, he explains.

For Mr. Farris, casual after-work dinners with five-star menus come naturally.

"I don't work because I have to work, I work because I like to work," he says.

With the laid-back atmosphere at a Farris party, there's only one rule of the house: Absolutely no one may touch or taste the food before it is finished and ready to be served, which is really no problem since guests usually gather at the outdoor tables, smoke, laugh and drink copious amounts of vino.

If it sounds like a grand life, it is. Mr. Farris believes this is what he was born to do -- host and cook and make people happy. In fact, he says, it's a matter of genetics.

"You don't become a chef, you're born a chef," he says.

CHEF FARRIS' RESTAURANTS
Arcodoro & Pomodoro,
2708 Routh St.,
Dallas Texas
214-871-1924
www.arcodoro.com

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