Forno Bello Wood Fired Pizza

Forno Bello Wood Fired Pizza sits at 138 S Woodland Blvd, just south of the main courthouse block in downtown DeLand, on the same general stretch as C’s Waffles and The Old House Cafe. The name translates roughly to beautiful oven, a direct reference to the wood fired oven at the center of the restaurant’s concept, the kind of high heat, live fire cooking method associated most closely with traditional Neapolitan pizza, producing a charred, blistered crust that a conventional oven cannot fully replicate.

Wood fired pizza restaurants require a genuine investment in specialized equipment and skilled staff who understand how to manage a live fire throughout a full dinner service, adjusting for temperature swings and cooking each pizza in a matter of minutes rather than the longer bake times a standard oven requires. That investment and skill set typically signals a restaurant genuinely committed to a specific, more traditional style of pizza making, distinct from the faster, more standardized approach used by most conventional pizza chains.

Its South Woodland Boulevard location, a short walk from the courthouse and the busiest part of downtown, gives Forno Bello access to both the lunch crowd working nearby and the dinner crowd drawn downtown for an evening out, joining Positano Trattoria Pizzeria and Urban Brick as one of several distinct approaches to pizza available within downtown DeLand’s compact historic core.

A restaurant built around live fire cooking also tends to offer some visual theater as part of the dining experience, with the oven itself often visible from the dining room, giving diners a chance to watch their pizza cook rather than simply having it appear from an unseen kitchen. That transparency has become a genuine draw for wood fired pizza restaurants generally, adding an experiential element beyond the food itself.

For anyone in DeLand specifically seeking out a proper Neapolitan style, wood fired pizza, Forno Bello’s South Woodland Boulevard location offers a dedicated, technically focused take on the format, rounding out downtown’s already varied pizza scene with a genuinely traditional approach.

Downtown DeLand now supports enough distinct pizza styles, wood fired Neapolitan at Forno Bello, brick oven at Urban Brick, trattoria style at Positano, and New York style at Tony’s, that a visitor could reasonably spend several separate evenings comparing them without repeating a single technique, a level of pizza specific variety that is genuinely unusual for a historic downtown of this size.