Gemelli Italian Grill owner Vince Busalacchi’s white-linen grill serves up some of the best veal and pasta dishes as only a veteran of Sicilian cooking could. Now, just around the corner from the grill, Busalacchi’s opened Gemelli Pizzeria, a casual, squeaky-clean pizzeria that brings us the high quality cheese and dough more familiar to back-East ovens – flawless pies capable of silencing a dozen whiny New York transplants.

Pizza purists have long lamented that Southern California’s dough is compromised by highly chlorinated tap water delivered through deteriorating pipe systems. But Gemelli’s dough is made with Panna water, from the famous Villa Panna in the hills of Tuscany, which is still bottled at the source. The resulting thin crust strikes a balance between airy and chewy with a hint of residual yeast boosting its flavor.

The kitchen also uses Grande mozzarella cheese from Wisconsin, which is high in butterfat and lends a nostalgic richness that locally, went out the window years ago. Sporting a faint yellowish hue, it came out of the oven polka-dotted with just the right amount of toasted bubble marks – thanks to high-heat baking and keeping it in the oven a minute or so past the so-called “cooked point.”

Busalacchi’s philosophy should be a lesson to other pizza makers: “If the cheese is white, it’s flavorless,” he told us. I couldn’t agree more.

Another trick he revealed about my half of a sausage-pepperoni-olive-onion-bell pepper pizza (split by toppings with a vegetarian friend) is that the crumbled homemade sausage starts off raw and cooks along with the pie. This allows for its tasty fennel-spiked fat to roam freely over the cheese, which adds superb flavor. The other half of the pizza was equally as fine, boasting semi-brined artichokes and diced tomatoes as meat replacements.

Of course no pizza can be addressed without scrutinizing its tomato sauce. Gemelli’s has a thin, pinkish color and is used scantily, in contrast to the heavy red sauces of southern Italian cooking – not a complaint so much as an impartial observation.

Joining forces with a pizza list containing 19 variations, from basic cheese to Vince’s Special (ricotta, onions anchovies, bread crumbs and Parmesan), are such peripherals as hot and cold sandwiches and the outstanding Gemelli’s Chopped Salad, a full-fledged diced antipasto that thankfully doesn’t incorporate pickled veggies into the scheme. (Those, I’ve long declared, fall into the embrace of third-generation Italians born in Arizona.)

The Lucky Luciano sandwich appeased my herbivore companion – a piling that included tomatoes and avocado and slightly sautéed mushrooms, bell peppers and onions tucked into a springy six-inch sub roll that Busalacchi buys fresh daily from a local baker. I opted for the Al Pacino, made with extra-lean roast beef, melted Swiss, tomatoes, and onions plus finely shredded iceberg lettuce common to the mom-and-pop sub shops of the Northeast. A little mayo and mustard made it good and sloppy.

Other sandwiches include a meat-loaded Goodfellas (salami, mortadella, ham and copocollo with Provolone, the Stallone (sausage, peppers and onions) and the Captain M.J. Souza (Portuguese linguica sausage that appears in a few other places on the menu) “just for something different,” said Busalacchi.

Food orders are placed at the front counter, where from a glass case you can also buy six different types of pizza by the slice. The dining area is bright and somewhat commodious, with soda dispensers in sight as well as a refrigerated unit holding pre-made desserts from various bakeries. A beer and wine license is in the pipeline.

Busalacchi said that he plans to open another pizzeria of the same name in North Park by the end of this year. Perhaps with more restaurateurs spreading good pizza over our land, Papa John’s and Oggis will someday lose out in reader polls as favorite pizzerias in San Diego.