If you’ve ever been curious about a certain pizzeria’s offerings, now’s the time to try.
If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.This weekend, pizza lovers will make a pilgrimage to Pizza City Fest at L.
A. Live, where scores of local pizza makers will serve all-you-can-eat slices to worshipful fans. For $125 on Saturday and $115 on Sunday, you’ll get to try eclectic styles and toppings, many only-in-L.A., along with sides, desserts, an open bar and demos and panel discussions. It’s all personally curated by festival founder Steve Dolinsky, aka “The Food Guy,” a 13-time James Beard-winning reporter who hosts a weekly Thursday night news segment on NBC Chicago. Now moonlighting as a pizza impresario, he started the festival in his hometown; it’s in its third year in L.A.“L.A. is a pizza city. Ten years ago, that wasn’t the case," Dolinsky said."But since the pandemic, a lot of people have pivoted to pizza. So we saw this as an opportunity to spread the word and share the good pizza that’s been out there.” Some notable L.A. trends he’s noticed are the ubiquity of ranch, the presence of soft-serve ice cream, and “everywhere seems to have a chocolate chip cookie.” Dolinsky doesn’t think there’s necessarily a unified style of pizza in Los Angeles, but since everyone seems to have a truck carting around pizza ovens, “you end up with a lot of Neapolitan-style with leopard spotting.” We talked to six pizza makers who will be at the fest and discovered what kind of slices they will be serving.Bronwen Kinzler-Britton got her start in pizza as a line cook at Paulie Gee’s in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She moved to L.A. during the pandemic and met fellow chef Jose Ibarra while cooking at Etta in Culver City. They started doing pop-ups in spring of 2023, and in January 2024 they opened Naughty Pie Nature on Glendale Boulevard in Echo Park. Kinzler-Britton describes their pizza as “Neapolitan style, with a simple recipe: 00 flour, salt, yeast and water.” Their best-seller at the restaurant is pepperoni, but “we want to flex our food muscle, and get antsy if it’s just pepperoni,” so they’ve come up with recipes like “The Cosmo,” inspired by orecchiette pasta, which they’ll be serving on Sunday.It’s “crushed tomatoes, mozzarella, Italian sausage, broccolini, confit garlic, parmesan, and finished with Calabrian chili,” she says. “But there’s no pasta in it.”During the wildfires, they joined more than 25 other pizzerias to form the L.A. Pizza Alliance, started by David Turkell, akaon Instagram, a much-followed online pizza “community organizer.” The pizza makers worked long shifts to feed Angelenos displaced by the fires and first-responders protecting the city. “We were donating as much as we could, and gave out free pies as people came in,” says Kinzler-Britton.A "Liotta" pizza from Ozzy's Apizza is made with their classic red sauce, olive oil, and parmesan cheese.Chris Wallace of Ozzy’s in North Hollywood has seen firsthand how a quality product can deliver viral traffic and put a newcomer on the map. When Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports visited and said it was the best pizza he’d had in L.A., Wallace says their sales quadrupled — and have not let up since. It’s all the more unexpected because the pizzeria serves New Haven-style pizza, simple thin-crust tomato pies with a sparing use of mozzarella, brought to the East Coast city by Italian immigrants. (For more on New Haven-style, read LAist’s“It’s our staple red and black thing, made with red sauce, olive oil, and parm,” says Wallace. It’s highly adaptable to all tastes — one reason they’re bringing it to the fest is because “it’s easy to make vegan without the parmesan.”"Best plain slice in Los Angeles", made with naturally leavened dough and topped with California tomatoes and low-moisture mozzarella.On Saturday, Alex Koons from Hot Tongue will keep it simple yet refined."We are bringing the best plain slice in Los Angeles," he says. Naturally leavened dough made with stone-milled organic grain from Washington is fermented for three days and topped with California tomatoes and low-moisture mozzarella."It's simple on paper, complex in flavor," he says."The hardest slice to execute, with nothing to hide behind, balanced, light and satisfying.”Also on Saturday, Triple Beam will serve squares of its 3.5-foot-long Roman-style “Tomato Confit” pie, a crowd favorite. Cherry tomatoes are lightly salted and slow-roasted in extra virgin olive oil with basil, pine nuts and garlic.Chef Marcos Buenrostro and Marilin Jimenez make Mexican-inspired pizzas out of their home in Guadalupe, a town in northern Santa Barbara County not far from the foodie enclaves of Los Alamos and Orcutt. Everything they serve could just as easily be a taco. “We’re just trying to infuse our traditional recipes into Neapolitan style pizza”, says Buenrostro. “We've got surf and turf tacos, carne asada tacos, birria tacos — you literally just swap tortillas for crust.” For now, they’re happy to be slinging pies at home. “We’ve considered opening a brick-and-mortar, but why would we waste three or four grand? We honestly get more traffic than the restaurants at our house,” he says. At the Fest they’ll offer up their “Tijuana-style Al Pastor Pizza”, a Neapolitan wood-fired pizza, with a green tomatillo salsa base, pickled red onions, radishes, piped guacamole, fresh pineapple and al pastor meat. Buenrostro says he’ll be cutting that directly from the trompo.Miller-Butler, San Pedro’s mobile pizzeria pop-up, will be handing out slices on Sunday. It’s a project by husband-and-wife duo Jillana Miller and Ahmad Butler. They started experimenting with pizza during the pandemic in early 2020, quickly growing a following in the Harbor area. They’ve created tons of unique pies, including a Jamaican jerk pizza, a crispy pork banh mi pizza, a birria pizza and a miso pizza which was inspired by a customer. “A sweet Japanese woman who makes artisan miso brought us a jar,” says Miller. “The miso quality was insane — we turned it into a white miso sauce, with Parmesan, which marries well together.”“It’s a light garlic cream, under our mozzarella/provolone cheese blend, with spinach, thinly sliced tomatoes, and after the oven we add basil, olive oil and our signature sofrito spice blend.”At a time when trusted news and information are more important than ever, your donation ensures that LAist can continue to serve everyone in our community. Make a powerful statement that you value quality reporting from LAist and safeguard the future of public media today with your gift.It's fighting talk, but LAist associate food editor Gab Chabrán says his hometown's combo of newcomers making waves and old timers making faves hits the spot.In a city that's exploding with excellent bakeries, deciding where to go for that croissant or cupcake can be a challenge. You told us your fave ravesI've Been Buying Carne Asada From This Street Vendor For A Year. Now I Understand His Hustle For Tacos 5 y 10 co-owner Daniel Martinez, serving food and community is about more than just money — it connects him back home.Two LA Businesses Tried To Honor Selena With A Beer. They Got A 'Cease And Desist' Letter From Selena's Family “It was a downer,” said Agustin Ruelas, the co-owner at Brewjeria, the Latino and POC-owned craft brewery in Pico Rivera. “We just wanted to honor Selena.”Does Sriracha Taste Different After The Shortage? We Put It To The Test — And Learned Proper Storage Etiquette In The Process After people began complaining online that Sriracha they'd bought recently didn't taste like the old stuff, we set out to find the answer. It didn't go well.From tortas to tuna melts, all sandwiches tell a unique story as they celebrate Los Angeles' diverse tapestry of flavors with each bite.I just couldn’t get comfortable with hearing only one side of an issueSearing audit finds city of LA has failed to properly track billions in homelessness spending
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