Disregard for a moment the disturbingly high concentration of beards and low-necked tees, the flannel everything nightmare that Bushwick can sometimes me. Because the pizza at Roberta’s is sufficiently delicious enough to offset any visceral reaction you might have to the amount of hipsters. The Bee Sting (spicy soppressata, hot honey, tomatoes, mozzarella) and the White Guy (mozz, ricotta, garlic, olive oil, sea salt) are the two I’ve had most often, and ones that I’d go back to again and again. Particularly the bee sting – I wouldn’t have ever thought to put honey on a pizza or with soppressata, but here we are, in a new age of Brooklyn consumption.
Other pizzas eaten: the Millenium Falco (sausage, basil, onion, tomato, parmigiano) and the Cheesus Christ (mozz, taleggio, black pepper, parm, cream). The latter is a commitment, an expectedly gooey and umami-pumped experience of food coma, but if you’re especially hungry, it’s a solid choice.
The crust at Roberta’s is fluffier and more doughy than my ideal pizza crust – which will always and forever be Nancy Silverton’s at Pizzeria Mozza – but with a good char in the oven, it does the trick just fine. The topping flavors are bold and that’s what I go for.
Sometimes though, the line at Roberta’s can get real long – I’ve heard two hours or more for weekend lunches. That inconvenience, more than anything else, is the tough part to navigate, especially if you’re trekking from Manhattan and have some modicum of schedule you want to stick to.
If you just want to satisfy a pizza craving, go next door to Roberta’s take-out shop and grab whatever you were going to wait for an hour and a half for, plus a few gloriously good sticky buns for the road. Speaking of sticky buns, if you do take a seat in the restaurant, they have (or had) a dessert sandwich of a big scoop of ice cream stuck between halves of a warmed-over sticky bun, buttery and salty and sticky-sweet. Phenomenal and impossible to eat with two hands.
The take-out menu is more limited and doesn’t have the veggie and meat dishes that the restaurant offers, but it does cover the greatest hits, so do what that what you will. I haven’t tried enough of the veggie dishes to vouch for them as much as they are hyped elsewhere, but as long as you’re not sacrificing pizza consumption I’m on board with whatever you do.
Roberta has branched out to the city as well, as an integral part of the Urbanspace experience, first at Mad Sq Eats, then Broadway Bites, and now at Vanderbilt, the upscale food court that Urbanspace has installed near Grand Central. Oh, and you can get their frozen pizzas in a bunch of Whole Foods in the city. Good job on the expansion, fellas.
Roberta’s (Google Maps)
House of Hao's 