The restaurant clings onto existence in Brooklyn. It’s really just a single room, the size of some living rooms, with an attached open kitchen. The single employee and owner–a middle aged Italian man, who is both impressively middle-aged and impressively Italian–has pots of live basil on the kitchen windowsill. The tomatoes come in huge cans out on display. Imported from Italy. The crust was thin, the sauce was rich and tangy and flavorful, and the cheese was soft and fresh and milky. I later read online that it was shut down for health code violations.
A Chicago-style joint in northern Oakland. Although there’s a decent amount of space inside, the line still wends its way out the door and down the block most days. Their pizza is closer to a casserole, with multiple inches of thick stewed tomato sauce piled on top of a comparatively thin layer of cheese. Maybe that cheese placement was the secret to keeping the crust from getting too soggy. Some of the region’s richer residents paid gig workers to stand in line for them, via an app.
The place in Berkeley is mid-sized, with seating almost reminiscent of a library. It’s full of students at most hours of the day. They keep costs down by only making one specific kind of pizza per day. The menu is preset but you can just get cheese pizza, but you might be judged a coward by casual observers. Toppings varied across local and seasonal ingredients and included things such as goat cheese, arugula, thin slices of yellow potatoes, and pineapple. I can’t remember but I assume most of their options were vegetarian. It’s no wonder students like it, because for what it is, it’s quite cheap and there’s no real wait. I liked it all except the pineapple.
