"Pizza! Pizza!" trumpets the Little Caesars slogan, and Munch always figured this a disclosure of the pizza industry's sad multiplicity, being that the first pizza always tastes like the second pizza, and the second always tastes like the third, and the third always tastes like the fourth. Pizza! Pizza! Pizza! Pizza! Ad nauseam. After a while, no matter where the pizza comes from, all slices start to crunch the same, smell the same and taste the same.

		Il Pizzaiolo is located at 703 Washington Road, Mt. Lebanon. Call 412-344-4123.

Munch long believed this an inherent curse of the pizza-making industry, as man can only do so much with bread and sauce and cheese, and even when man tries to get creative with these ingredients, things go horribly wrong, as evidenced by pizza's unholy offspring, the pepperoni Hot Pocket.

Thankfully, Munch recently visited Il Pizzaiolo and consumed a pizza that can be rightfully described, with only slight overstatement, as an industry salvation. Il Pizzaiolo's pizza is different, totally different. And thanks to some unique twists, it bests the generic 12-slices-from-the-box pizza by almost any manner of measurement. Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizzaiolo.

On the back of its take-out menu, Il Pizzaiolo tells us what, exactly, a "pizzaiolo" is, properly assuming that nobody knows. So it explains, in centered text that looks like an elongated haiku: "The Pizzaiolo is: One part artist. One part chemist. And one part historian." If this sounds ridiculous, or even offensively high-brow, Munch must clarify that Il Pizzaiolo serves the food to back it up. This is the kind of pizza Italian ambassadors order for their Super Bowl parties.

At Il Pizzaiolo, pizza is a delicacy (only in the sense that it tastes like delicacy; not that it's rare). When Munch sat down with Father of Munch, we decided quickly on his food choice -- a fortunate occurrence, only because the menu font, small like this, practically made the eyes burn. That, however, was the last joking complaint Munch and FOM shared during the evening.

We both started out with a little greenery. FOM found his simple and light Casa salad ($8) quite enjoyable, and Munch similarly enjoyed his Caesar salad ($8) -- at least after the anchovies were discreetly pushed to the side. Then the pizza arrived, landing at our table following a trip through a 750-degree brick oven. (It should be noted that Il Pizzaiolo gets bonus points for serving Munch's favorite non-alcoholic beverage; at this point, Munch ordered his second cream soda.)

Then we started in on the Margherita Doc pizza ($14), one of the traditional Il Pizzaiolo dishes. Which is to say, it looks decidedly untraditional. Unlike most pizzas, which are covered and smothered by cheese, Il Pizzaiolo goes easy with the fixings. On this particular pie -- six slices, perfectly portioned for two -- buffalo cheese covered about half of the surface area, and an easy, smooth tomato sauce covered the rest, giving this dish the odd look of an archaic world map: flat, half-land, half-water.

Il Pizzaiolo's production is different in almost every manner. The pizza is so thin, it's almost two-dimensional. The topping selection is wondrously expansive: Customers can find pizzas featuring, among other things, artichokes, eggplant and prosciutto.

It's authentic Italian. And as Munch read more about the restaurant -- the rear of the menu explained the finer points of Il Pizzaiolo's tradizione -- we practically forgot that we were sitting in Downtown Mt. Lebanon, across from restaurants and down the street from restaurants that serve pizza the way everybody is used to. Munch is now convinced of this much: Everybody should get used to this.