Tucked on 31st St, just off M Street, Il Canale has occupied prime Georgetown real estate since it opened in 2010. In a hood where explosive rents regularly blast restaurants into oblivion, Il Canale’s longevity is impressive — and baffling.
DishingPizza takes both its Dishing and Pizza responsibilities seriously, so it’s only fair to begin with these four Il Canale positives:
- DishingPizza was waited upon by a young, humble Italian man who was very charming and attentive.
- The joint is legit Italian, run by Italians, with Italian employees. DishingPizza isn’t certain, but non-native Italian staff may be encouraged to adopt fake Italian accents.
- For its location, Il Canale is reasonably priced.
- The pizza is served on pretty Italian ceramic plates.
Owner Joe Farruggio’s1 hype notwithstanding, Il Canale is not cute, is not charming, and serves forgettable wood-fired pizza. Yet, Il Canale’s touristy, braggadocious web page trumpets all the glitterati who love the place:
Making an authentic pizza Napoletana is an Art, according to Joe Farruggio, the mind behind the wildly successful Georgetown restaurant Il Canale. If you are privy to the Washingtonian social circles, you must have heard of Il Canale, a celebrity hot spot in the heart of the national capital’s neighborhood Georgetown.
Everyone in the Who’s Who in American Power playbook has dined here. Il Canale has been a go-to place of journalists, actors and heads of states from Hillary Clinton to Brigitte Macron to Nancy Pelosi to Ivanka Trump. Harrison Ford likes to come here when he is in town, and when he shows up, it’s very low key.
It just goes to show that journalists, actors, and heads of State don’t necessarily have good taste.2 However, if DishingPizza were to run into a very low-key Harrison Ford at Il Canale, it would perform a public service, offering Han Solo a list of nearby spots with great pizza.
Il Canale is the kind of place where bombast substitutes for quality, where obsequious men wearing tight blazers suck up to the rich and the famous, where the walls are adorned with photos of celebrities duped into dining here. Georgetown has long been a Eurotrash sanctuary — Il Canale, with its blue backlighting at the bar, plays into that aesthetic.
DishingPizza is so worked up, it almost forgot its most important responsibility — the pizza. That’s because, after all the hype surrounding this restaurant and its “best pizza” reviews, the pizza tastes like a wood-fired commodity.3 The crust is charred, verging on burnt. The middle is floppy, if not quite wet on the bottom. The thin San Marzano sauce is applied with too heavy a hand, overwhelming the perfectly decent mozzarella.
DishingPizza wouldn’t be so grumpy about this pizza if its expectations weren’t so high. If a restaurant advertises that it’s “known for its authentic Verace pizza Italiana and is the only restaurant in D.C. to receive the top culinary honor from the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce and the National Institute of Tourism,” its pizza should be goddamned great.
Il Canale is named for the nearby C&O Canal, which has been drained of water for repairs since 2022 — an apt metaphor.
1 Joe Farruggio is a shameless self-promoter with a memoir titled “My Name is Joe and I’m a Pizza Man.” This is also the same Joe who created the now-extinct, unassuming Joe’s Place Pizza and Pasta, which used to serve an excellent all-you-can-eat New York-style pizza buffet. DishingPizza used to enjoy the lunch buffet. According to Joe, he visited Naples and fell in love with Neopolitan pizza. That’s when he grew too big for his britches.
2 Just check out these photos of today’s Oval Office.
3 DishingPizza has bitched plenty about the preponderance of wood-fired ovens in the DMV producing mediocre pies, but can’t resist beating a dead horse. Case in point, the entreprenurial Farruggio owns another joint, 90 Second Pizza on Wisconsin Ave, just around the corner from Il Canale, serving fast-food wood-fired pizza in yet another tiled, Marra Forni commercial brick oven.
Il Canale
1065 31st St NW, Washington, DC 20007
Style: Wood-fired
Pizza quality: 🍕🍕
Overall experience: ⭐⭐
Pie (12″): $16
Pie price per square inch: $0.14