By my third visit to Marco's Coal-Fired Pizzeria, I was part of the inner circle, recognizable in the flurry of faces that clearly had a mad crush on the joint.

Greeted warmly - "you're a regular now!" - with a tight squeeze from owner and pizza patriarch Mark Dym, we made our way to a familiar booth, the same one I'd sat in during all of my dinners here.

After dinner, when the air was still boldly scented with the smoke and char of blistered crusts and cooking pizza, Dym lulled us away from our Nutella pizza ($9), smeared with that sweet spread of hazelnut and chocolate and dusted with powdered sugar and cocoa, to parade us through the open kitchen buzzing with pizzaiuoli yanking pies from the sweltering ovens.

Dym is rightfully proud of those two domed brick ovens, telling you with the fervor of a child who's just discovered Santa Claus that they were built in Italy and shipped to his kitchen, where they burn at 1,000 degrees, the wood and coal within a blazing storm of flames and embers.

Dym is making chivalrous service at his two-month-old pizza palace an art form, hustling from table to table in his baggy black pants and white apron, ashed from coal and wood, to greet customers with passion, often persuading them to try his chicken wings ($8 small; $13 large), a dish that you can find all over town, but rarely like this. Crowned with thick slices of Vidalia onions, the wings sing with the flavors of thyme, oregano, garlic and lemon, and they are baked in the coal-fired oven until their crackled skins are scorched ebony. They are, in a word, incredible.

You probably won't forget the space either. It's a designer's dream of stylish nuances, accented with glossy, brightly hued tiles and ornate wrought iron scrolls. Potted herbs perch on stained concrete tables and the dark-wood office chairs - wheels attached - are a groovy touch. Multicolored booths buttressed against exposed red walls, smudged with a single black swatch of paint inscribed with the word pomodori (tomatoes), are nearly the size of sofas, which makes it all too easy to linger.

But linger you will, if not for the committed service and comfortable, lounge-lizard quarters, then for the Neapolitan pizzas, served with a 12-inch diameter, on stark white, round plates. There are no slices, no substitutions and, thank god, no chicken.

Instead, most of the requisite thin-crusted pizzas are lightly smirched with San Marzano tomatoes and extra virgin olive oil and sprinkled sparingly with Pecorino Romano and fresh mozzarella. The toppings, half of them traditional ingredients found in Naples and half familiar New York favorites, are used judiciously. This is not a place to skyscrape your pizza with a kitchen sink of accoutrements.

Marco's dough is made from pure white flour, imported from Italy, and when the pizzas, some 60 seconds after they've been shoved under the flame, emerge from the wood-fired oven with bubbles the size of geysers, your jaw drops in astonishment. And then, with that first bite, you want to drop to your knees.

The Toscana ($17) - draped with sheets of prosciutto, arugula leaves, grape tomatoes and Gran-Cru, an aged, Italian hard cheese that's similar to Pecorino Romano - is my hands-down favorite. But I also like the Manhattan ($14), a pizza topped with fennel-flaked Italian sausage and smoke- infused shreds of broccoli rabe.

A white pizza, the Abruzzo ($16), is nothing more than a simply superb - and simply topped - round of bufala mozzarella, Gran Cru, Parmigiano Reggiano and Caciocavallo (translation: "cheese on horseback"), a sharp, slightly salty cheese reminiscent of provolone.

The kitchen's take on the standard calzone ($14) is a lighter, flatter half moon, baked until golden, sliced into quarters and stuffed with ricotta, Genoa salami, fresh mozzarella and Pecorino Romano.

Beyond the pizzas, there's an antipasto plate ($15). On one evening, it was beautifully arranged in triangles of imported meats - salumi, prosciutto, soppresatta - and cheeses, augmented by a wonderful olive salad and a pudgy cherry pepper popping with Italian tuna. On a subsequent night, it was absent a cheese, messily assembled and sadly devoid of the cherry pepper, which I could eat in bulk.

It's nice, though, to see such a whimsical wine roster, separated into headings like "flirty", "sultry", "voluptuous" and "tingly." And unlike many Italian wine lists where Tuscan Chiantis are the norm, Marco's wine list actually offers a few choices from Campagna, whose largest city is Naples.

I can drink to that.

Marco's Coal-Fired Pizzeria

* Grade: A-

* Address: 2129 Larimer St.

* Hours: 11 a.m.- 10 p.m. Sun.- Thurs.; 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Fri.-Sat.

* Food: Pizza; Italian

* How much: $6-$15 salads and antipasto plate; $11-$17 pizzas; $9 sandwiches; $8 and $13 coal-fired chicken wings

* Reservations: Recommended on weekends

* Noise: Clamorous, but not unbearable

* Information: 303-296-7000 or marcoscoalfiredpizza.com

* Parking: Complimentary lot adjacent to restaurant; metered street parking