If the best thin-crust white pizza imaginable spawned a love child with traditional focaccia, it would taste something like Chef Nancy Silverton’s focaccia di recco. The pride of her Michelin-Green-Starred L.A. restaurant, Chi Spacca, the crunchy, cheese-oozing revelation is the culmination of two years of toothsome research by Silverton and Chef Chad Colby. It was well worth the toil. 
Unlike the thick, bready-style focaccia from Italy’s Liguria region, Silverton’s take draws inspiration from Recco, a hilltop town in Genoa—a crispier version as whisper-thin as matzo flatbread. The dish went through hundreds of iterations before it was deemed worthy of its place on the menu. 

The unleavened wonder is lavished with olive oil and filled with a salted, fermented mozzarella reminiscent of the creamy, aged stracchino typical of Recco. It’s cooked to perfection in a scorching deck oven atop heavy-gage baking steel. (After tasting the transcendent focaccia at Recco’s old-school tavern, Manuelina, Silverton ordered the restaurant’s Piedmont-crafted pans for Chi Spacca.) 
That all tracks for L.A.’s ‘Goddess of the Delicious’, the bearer of titles such as James Beard Outstanding Chef and Food & Wine’s Best New Chef collected over the course of a heralded career filled with prestigious nods. Perhaps the highest honor? Local foodies will tell you this focaccia di recco is one of the top tastes in the City of Angels.