Terra Mare Restaurant & Bar in downtown Wheaton bills itself as an Italian restaurant. A Marra Forni commercial brick pizza oven sits front and center, establishing Terra Mare’s Neapolitan bona fides. Its menu contains Italian dishes and pizzas.
Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? Kinda.
The green, red, and white Terra Mare logo echoes the colors of the Mexican flag. The Pizza Hut-like interior is probably not much changed since 2022, when Terra Mare took over the space formerly occupied by Intipuqueño Restaurant, a Latin American and Spanish eatery. Terra Mare’s menu also has Carne Asada, a Mexican speciality, and other Latin influences. So, Terra Mare is a fusion restaurant, Italian with a Central American vibe. Unusual, and this is what attracted DishingPizza to Terra Mare.
Without belaboring it, DishingPizza has bitched and moaned about the same old Neapolitan wood-fired local pizzas. With a few exceptions, the blistered crust, San Marzano tomatoes, and Mozzarella di Bufala are yawnsville and interchangeable. Terra Mare throws a curveball.
Terra Mare has a pizza that fuses Neapolitan wood-fired pizza with loroco, an unusual, Central American climbing vine with edible flowers. Loroco has a unique, floral flavor, with notes of broccoli and squash. The taste was familiar to DishingPizza, but hard to place. Turns out that loroco is a common ingredient in Salvadoran cheese pupusas — and DishingPizza loves a good cheese pupusa.
DishingPizza ordered the Loroco pizza, violating its cardinal rule of sampling a pizzeria’s most basic pizza. In its defense, DishingPizza is frustrated with boring wood-fired pizza and sought something unique. What could be more unique than a Latin American-themed Neapolitan pizza?
Terra Mare knows how to bake a pizza. The crust was perfect – chewy and lightly blistered, without the common wood-fired soggy middle malady. Surprisingly, the Terra Mare pizza isn’t even a soggy mess after reheating a couple of days later. Instead of San Marzano sauce, the pizza has a delicious “loroco-infused sauce” in addition to a generous application of loroco buds. The cheese is adequate, but nothing special.
Is Terra Mare pizza world-class? No, but it has the basics down. But it’s the idiosyncratic loroco twist that makes Terra Mare a must-try.
Terra Mare Restaurant & Bar
2504 Ennalls Ave, Wheaton-Glenmont, MD 20902
Style: Wood-fired
Pizza Quality: 🍕🍕🍕
Overall experience: ⭐⭐
Pie (12″ Loroco): $17.95
Price per square inch: $0.16