Well, the LA pizza scene just gets better and better…hard to believe but this phenomenon doesn’t seem to be slowing down…tried Gorilla Pizza in Valley Village tonite…excellent pizza…
Ben Osher calls this Pittsburgh style…personally, I’m not really familiar with Steel City pizza styles, but I would call this more along the lines of Neo-Neapolitan…he’s using Bianco DiNapoli tomato for the marinara, a Caputo/King Arthur flour blend, baked in an Earthstone oven which uses some kind of “synthetic” logs…The chef’s “Signature Pies” are, to my traditional pizza palette, rather strange but that is what people do these days, which is fine with me…I ordered a "“Kitten” pie which is basically a Margherita, to which I added spicy sausage to my half while my friend added shiitake mushrooms to her half of the pie…
I will say that at first Chef Ben was close to giving me the ol’ “we don’t allow substitutions or changes” like diff toppings on 2 halves…but as I was only adding one topping to each half, it was cool.
the other issue is at 7pm they were very busy with take out orders, which is great…but I don’t understand why my pie couldn’t have been squeezed in there somewhere as we were going to eat in the pizzeria…anyway, so it goes…when it arrived about 45 minutes later, it was worth the wait…a nice thin crust with a puffy and charred cornicione, the spicy fennel sausage was very flavorful, and the shiitake was shaved so thin that, slightly salted & fried, it actually could’ve been called bacon…Personally, I would’ve liked thicker pieces of mushroom so as to taste the shroom more, but it was very tasty…and something somewhat rare and which might be an aspect of the hearty Pittsburgh style is the very plentiful sauce.
All in all, a really excellent addition to the pizza landscape…it’s crazy when I think back to LA pizza 20 years ago…the only pizza worth eating was at Peppe Miele’s Antica Pizzeria in MDR…those traditional Neapolitan pies were eye opening…Now, in 2021, there are numerous pizzerias serving great slices and pies from Little Coyote in Long Beach to Pizza Wagon and Gorilla Pies in the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles proper from DTLA to SM…wow!
interesting, so you’re originally from the Steel City? I’ve always wanted to visit there…definitely, I think you’ll really like the pizza…they also offer slices from two types of pies…you can probably add toppings to the slices but I didn’t confirm that.
This is the saddest thing I’ve heard on the board in awhile. I always look forward to your fast food/ highly unhealthy but delicious food adventure reports.
Not sure we’d be able to have a true apizza due to stringent rules in LA around coal or wood fired ovens. I feel like without a decades old coal burning oven it won’t be the same.
I’m pretty sure the Grimaldi’sin El Segundo(which I haven’t been to in quite a while) uses coal burning ovens…I don’t remember how they got around the enviro rules…
I’ve never had one from NJ (or south philly, for that matter), but I used to frequent here:
all the time at their now-closed Melrose location off of Fairfax. Their tomato pie is absolutely delicious, though, as I said, I can’t vouch for their authenticity.
I thought they were excellent, both in the just darn tasty sense and in the value-for-money.
no sir! nothing at all authentic here!
their name is Tomato Pie but they don’t serve real tomato pies…and after they gave me ranch dressing as a side, I never went back!
I was NEVER offered ranch. I don’t blame you for not returning. I would have been equally offended.
But still, their tomato pie, whatever it actually is, is a very thin, focaccia-like crust, with sauce on top, baked in, so the bottom of the slice is crispy but the top is soft and a little chewy. then a light sprinkling of cheap shaker-parmesean and oregano on top.
Is this the kind of tomato pie you guys are talking about? Thin crust, topped first with a layer of mozzarella, then with a lot of tomatoes, then with more mozzarella, comes out crisp?
ha, ha…yep…enough saltiness and anything is tasty crap…I remember right after they opened there was a big article in Esquire by Alan Richman rating the best pizzerias in the US…he rated them #7…I went there the next day…after a #7 rating, I was gonna rip them a new asshole if they were even slightly less than great…they might’ve been the 700th best…thats what really pissed me off was how this nationally known food critic could rate them so highly…I was viscerally “boiling!”
