When you think “Casino Royale,” you think James Bond, right? After a visit to Pinocchio in Pound Ridge that just might change.

The Casino Royale is Pinocchio’s pizza version of Clams Casino — a crispy pie topped with baby clams, slab bacon, tomatoes, white wine, garlic and roasted red peppers. It’s just like the clams appetizer at your favorite checkered-clothed Italian restaurant — only better. A lot better. So good, in fact, that the Casino Royale won the top award for best seafood pizza in the 2008 North Atlantic Pizza Show.

And that’s not the only award Pinocchio has to its name. Bruno DiFabio, who owns Pinocchio, Amore Pizza in Scarsdale and two branches of Pinocchio Pizza in Connecticut, is the 2009 U.S. champion, a six-time World Pizza champion, and he won the Best Traditional Pizza medal at the 2010 World Games at the Las Vegas Pizza Expo. (Yes, there is such a thing.)?

He has 16 medals in all, and has appeared on “Rachael Ray” and “The Today Show.” As if that wasn’t enough, this year, Food & Wine magazine named his restaurant on the West Coast, Tony’s Pizza Napoletana, one of the best new Italian spots in the country.

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Predictions for the 2011 Pound Ridge NY real estate market.

Freddie Mac analysts point to five features that they believe will likely characterize the 2011 housing and mortgage markets: 

1. Low mortgage rates. With Fed observers expecting the central bank to keep the federal funds rate at its current target range of 0 percent to 0.25 percent for most (or all) of 2011, relatively low mortgage rates will be a feature of the 2011 mortgage market. Thirty-year fixed-rate loans are likely to remain below 5 percent throughout the year, and initial rates of 5/1 hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages will likely remain below 4 percent in 2011. 

.2. Prices have hit bottom. House prices are likely to begin a gradual, but sustained recovery in the second half of 2011.  

3. Housing will remain affordable. With affordability high, many first-time buyers will be attracted to the housing market in the New Year, likely translating into more home sales in 2011 than in 2010. 

4. Refinances will dwindle. Many eligible borrowers have already refinanced and the federal Making Home Affordable  refinance program is expiring on June 30. While fixed-rate loans are likely to remain low, they will move up gradually, making it even less likely that refinances will be attractive to most home owners 

5. Delinquency rates will decline. Based on the last several business cycles, the share of loans that are 90 or more days delinquent or in foreclosure proceedings — known as the “seriously delinquent rate” — generally crests within a year of the start of the recovery in payroll employment, and this economic recovery appears to fit within that pattern. Payrolls began to rise last January, and by the spring the seriously delinquent rate had begun to fall. 

Source: Freddie Mac (12/09/2010)

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