Is Indaco a pizza restaurant, a purveyor of familiar Italian comfort or the archetypal restaurant one would hope to find in Rome or Fiorano? Possibly all three.
Indaco’s pizza dough ferments through a four-day process and — once lightly topped with gorgeous ingredients — is fired in a wood-burning oven. The meatballs are a vibrant example of something familiar achieving new culinary heights. And the pastas are all produced in the Indaco kitchen and served with locally farmed produce and meats, redolent with fresh herbs and true Parmesan cheese.
Surely Indaco’s chef speaks with a Ligurian accent, correct?
“Plymouth, Massachusetts, is my hometown but I’m Irish through and through. Somehow, I’ve always been drawn to Italian cuisine,” chef Josh Begley said. “Maybe it’s the cultural aspect of it. It’s something that so many chefs are attracted to. Heck, the first thing I can remember making in a kitchen was a meatball.”
Begley has been a part of The Indigo Road Hospitality Group for a few years and spent time in the Indaco restaurants in Charleston and Charlotte, North Carolina.
“Each restaurant is different as is each menu, and they’re all chef driven. I’ve been given a lot of latitude with this menu, and we buy several times a week from local farms through the Swamp Rabbit Food Hub,” Begley said. “We buy a local pig weekly and that shows up in several dishes.”
Running an aspirational restaurant is a significant challenge, as is creating multiple versions of a single brand that each feel unique. Indaco manages to pull that off with gracious hospitality and plenty of smiles. Many restaurants are missing a key ingredient: eye contact. At Indaco, everyone from the hostess to the cooks seem to understand that customers return not for the food, but how they were made to feel while eating that food. Much of gracious service is subliminal, yet it is the key to a customer having a great experience and at Indaco they’ve got it in spades.
It helps that the food is worth writing home about, too, especially the pizza, with the unmistakable smoky char that only happens with a wood fire. My brother was stationed for five years in the ancestral home of pizza — Naples, Italy — and this is the only pizza in town that I’d insist he try.
Begley is a new resident of our town and he’s thrilled with Greenville, its tightknit downtown and our thriving hospitality community. After spending so much time in towns with substantial coastlines and plenty of salt water, is there anything he misses?
“Fog on the morning water can be very romantic,” he said.
I agreed, then had another bite of agnolotti and told Mrs. Malik: “So can pasta.”
Indaco, at 40 W. Broad St., opens at 5 p.m. daily for dinner and serves lunch Thursdays through Sundays.
“City Juice” is a colloquial term for a glass of tap water served at a diner. John Malik is a culinary adviser and broker with National Restaurant Properties. He can be reached at chefjohnmalik@gmail.com.
