It crackles upon meeting your teeth, but its white interior is delicate, filled with small air pockets.Ĭrackle is the entire point of the nonconformist pie that’s sprinkled with salt, pepper and rosemary, and shellacked with bacon fat. The crust is sturdy, but not brittle or tough. The highest bubbles on the sizable outer rim are starting to go black, and there are patches of char on the base. Other doughs have a more complex flavor, but the one at Pizza Moto is far from bland. The crust is in the modern Brooklyn-Neapolitan family exemplified by Franny’s and Roberta’s. Chile oil makes the eggs in hell a more engaging bacon-and-eggs than the carbonara pizza, a special whose four cheeses melded into a single, not very interesting white blanket. Tomato sauce underlies the very good pepperoni pizza (it’s actually chorizo, slightly hotter, and tangy) and the “eggs in hell” pizza, which has bacon and mozzarella arrayed around the cyclopean eye of a single sous-vide egg. But what makes it hard to put down is the flavor of clams cooked in cream and white wine that suffuses the whole thing. The clam pie is something like a flat clam chowder: It’s topped with sliced potatoes and profoundly smoky bacon. The pizzas have grown to a 14-inch size you can share without scowling, and there are more of them. Despite minor variability, the pies coming out of the old bakery are already among the top tier of New York brick-oven pizzas. But the pies at the new restaurant don’t need any such qualification. Those are without a doubt the best brick-oven pizzas a New Yorker can find in a schoolyard or park. Most are pretty good, but there’s more joy in the pizzas, which go well beyond the limited varieties of single-serving pies that sustain the outdoor operation. He has an imaginative bunch of appetizers that aren’t bound by the conventions of pizzerias or even Italian restaurants. In the new restaurant, given the unwieldy full name Pizza Moto John Grace Bakery, Mr. Would there be a lot of red tape to cut through before the city would grant permits, and the restaurant would open in October? You bet. Viertel undertake most of the masonry, plumbing, welding and electrical work themselves? Absolutely. Would it take more than two years of restoration and modification to make the oven work again? Yes. Behind the back wall was a large white-tiled oven from the late 19th -or early 20th century, sealed up and long forgotten. Then he and his business partner, Anna Viertel, looked at the site, on the grim, shadowy, underpopulated borderland between Carroll Gardens and Red Hook. When he was ready to open a stationary pizzeria in Brooklyn, a defunct Papa John’s where pizzas were made in a gas oven would not seem to have held much appeal for him. Sclarow is one of those chefs for whom half the fun is playing with fire, not to mention building the fire and a heatproof structure to contain it. The third Pizza Moto oven was stolen last year, but he still has three others designed along the same lines.Ĭlearly Mr. Sclarow got serious, engineering a steel-hulled model shaped like a Quonset hut. It was the second oven in which he started baking small, irregular, alluringly blistered margheritas at the Brooklyn Flea in 2008. The next time he took his mobile pizza oven for a spin, it collapsed, but by that point, he liked it so much that he rebuilt it. They were getting married some distance from Brooklyn, where he lived, so he layered the bricks and concrete on top of a flatbed trailer that he could hitch to the back of his Volkswagen Doka. David Sclarow built his first wood-burning pizza oven so he could feed guests at the wedding of two cheesemakers.
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