Pork-and-beef bolognese pizza at Bub and Grandma’s Pizza in Highland Park.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
7 new favorite pizzas to try in Los Angeles
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There is no discriminating when it comes to styles of pizza. No picking a favorite from the panoply of sauce, cheese and crust. I see your cheese lace-edged Detroit-style square and I raise you a puffy, leopard-spotted Neapolitan pie. A slice of New York-style pizza can be a dependable friend. Then there are the superlative pies at Pizzeria Bianco, and the singular pizzas from Pizzeria Mozza.
Are the pies with toppings that shift with the seasons any better than the pizzas blanketed in pepperoni cups destined for late-night munchies? It really depends on your mood. And in Los Angeles, we have them all.
Below are my favorite new places for a slice or whole pie, with a pizza for every occasion and persuasion.
Showing Place Places
Fiorelli Pizza
Beverly Grove Pizza Italian $
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times )
Michael Fiorelli’s pizza could be categorized as a cross between New York and Neapolitan, based on his dough hydration levels, and the temperature of his oven.
“If you showed a pizzaiolo what I was doing, they would say it’s all wrong,” says Fiorelli. “Wrong flour, wrong temp. But we do it that way because we like the way it tastes.”
Fiorelli and business partner Liz Gutierrez opened a pizzeria out of a teensy Beverly Grove storefront in early November. Before that, they were making pizzas with a mobile oven at Cook’s Garden in Venice. Fiorelli’s crust has the structure of a New York pizza, with just enough crunch, and an interior with the supple softness of a traditional Neapolitan. He brushes the crust with extra virgin olive oil and sprinkles on sea salt just before the pizza goes into the oven, ensuring that each slice is well seasoned through the last bite. Crushed Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes and sea salt constitute his red sauce, for a base that’s flavorful but not overly acidic. He covers the tomatoes in leaves of Brussels sprouts and hot cherry peppers on one pie, or there’s the classic pepperoni or supreme. The Bianco deserves special praise, with a symphony of four cheeses, roasted garlic, fingerling potatoes, fresh lemon and guindilla peppers. Bite the tip of a pepper, drizzle the juice on a slice and enjoy.
“If you showed a pizzaiolo what I was doing, they would say it’s all wrong,” says Fiorelli. “Wrong flour, wrong temp. But we do it that way because we like the way it tastes.”
Fiorelli and business partner Liz Gutierrez opened a pizzeria out of a teensy Beverly Grove storefront in early November. Before that, they were making pizzas with a mobile oven at Cook’s Garden in Venice. Fiorelli’s crust has the structure of a New York pizza, with just enough crunch, and an interior with the supple softness of a traditional Neapolitan. He brushes the crust with extra virgin olive oil and sprinkles on sea salt just before the pizza goes into the oven, ensuring that each slice is well seasoned through the last bite. Crushed Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes and sea salt constitute his red sauce, for a base that’s flavorful but not overly acidic. He covers the tomatoes in leaves of Brussels sprouts and hot cherry peppers on one pie, or there’s the classic pepperoni or supreme. The Bianco deserves special praise, with a symphony of four cheeses, roasted garlic, fingerling potatoes, fresh lemon and guindilla peppers. Bite the tip of a pepper, drizzle the juice on a slice and enjoy.
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Sonny's
Hollywood Italian Pizza $$
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)
I will preface this blurb with the fact that yes, I have seen all the social media influencers proclaiming this to be the best new pizza in Los Angeles. It’s a giant pizza, with a diameter the size of a semi truck tire and a crust that’s so crisp, it’s audible in every video. I too got swept up in the tornado of hype and found myself desperately attempting to procure a pizza. The ordering process is online only, and involves opening the website right at 12 p.m. to order a pizza for pickup at the Hollywood storefront. It took three tries, but I finally secured a pepperoni pizza. Did I want to add on hot honey or burrata? No, it’s not 2008, and I don’t want every slice to be soggy with cold burrata and taste like honey. After you pay for the order, you’re given a pick-up time, which may or may not be the one you selected when you paid. Mine was about 30 minutes earlier, but I was so elated at actually ordering the pizza that I couldn’t be bothered. A layer of bronze oil sits atop the pizza and lulls in the many cups of pepperoni. It creates a sheen over the cheese. My fingers were shiny. The oil dripped down my chin. The cheese, sauce and crust coalesce into a slender slice that’s sturdy enough but flops at the tip. Some of the crust was cracker-like and golden. Some of it was burnt. It’s not a perfect pizza, but I appreciated the thinness of the crust and the flavor of the grease-streaked mottled cheese. And if someone else is offering to go through the trouble of ordering the pizza, I’ll happily eat it.
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Old Gold Tomato Pies
Los Feliz Pizza Italian $
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times )
My grade school cafeteria served pizza cut into a squares, covered in nothing more than red sauce and stark white stringy cheese that never quite melted. Crispy edges? Think again. Jeffrey Vance’s Sicilian-style squares at his new Los Feliz pizzeria are what I always wished my middle school pizza could be. He started making pizza during the pandemic, hosting parking lot pizza parties and pop-ups at restaurants and bakeries. Vance’s dough is spongy like good focaccia, surrounded by a crisp, airy crust. The red sauce clings to the crust under a deluge of cheese that’s half melted, half golden bubbles. The edges of his pepperoni cups char beautifully in the oven. White pies are smeared with crème fraîche for an extra luxurious base under clams and bacon or market mushrooms, red onion and fennel pollen. Vance, who once adhered to a plant-based diet, is also making a handful of vegan pies like the Moral High Ground, topped with artichokes, Kalamata olives, spinach, red onion and vegan cheese. And don’t miss Vance’s focaccia. The slabs are perfectly dimpled and scattered with pools of good olive oil, salty green olives, sesame seeds and rosemary. It makes for an excellent snack or sandwich bread the next day.
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Redwood Pie
Hermosa Beach Italian Pizza $
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times )
I first encountered Erik Vose’s pizza when he was operating Vivace Pizzeria, a food truck that housed a 5,500-pound Acunto Mario oven. He made some of the best bubble-flecked Neapolitan pies in the city. Now he’s creating his own category of pizza at Redwood Pie in Hermosa Beach. It’s the accumulation of years spent working under Steve Samson at Sotto, and baking bread for Ca’d’Oro Bakery in Inglewood. He’s making a sourdough crust with a blend of five flours from Central Milling. It’s bready and wonderfully chewy, sheathed in a mix of amber orbs and tight, tiny bubbles that create the ideal crunch. The slice of pepperoni is textbook perfect, with a well-balanced sauce, a blanket of cheese and pepperoni cups that transform into blistered meat candy in the oven. For the white pie fans, there’s the D-Fresh. The mozzarella base is a rugged landscape of hot Italian sausage crumbles, frizzled basil and pickled Serrano chiles that will leave your lips humming with heat.
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Wallflour Pizza
Eagle Rock Italian Pizza $
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times )
Wallflour Pizza originally began as Quarantine Pizza Co., a backyard pandemic pop-up out of Brandon Conaway and Carolina Pedroza-Conaway’s Highland Park home in 2020. The two opened Wallflour on a busy stretch of Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock in the spring. Brandon is known as somewhat of a pizza maverick. In the past, he’s speckled his pies with things like salsa verde, honey chipotle chicken sausage and fish sauce caramel. His creative streak is still evident at Wallflour, but with a menu that leans into a more traditional neighborhood pizza joint. There’s a slight but distinct tang to his sourdough crust, with a tawny surface crowded in crisp bubbles of all shapes and sizes. The crust’s unique texture and flavor shines brightest under the California Dream, with just a light layer of crushed tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, garlic confit, oregano Indio and sea salt. And he’s still making the Spiceroni, a favorite from the Quarantine Pizza Co. days. The pizza’s house-made hot honey imparts an addictive sweet heat to the pickled jalapenos and pepperoni.
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Cosetta
Santa Monica Pizza Italian $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Blink and you’ll miss Cosetta, Zach Pollack’s California-Italian restaurant tucked into the corner of a Santa Monica business park. Here, the pizza is reminiscent of the pies he made at the now-closed Cosa Buona, with thick, even puffier crusts that act as a barrier for a flurry of toppings. It’s at once crisp and soft, flexible but sturdy. He’s riffing on the Hawaiian pizza with a pie dubbed the Hawaiian sunrise, covered in house-smoked coppa, pineapple and jalapeño. Or there’s the Lo Spagnolo Ricco splayed with slivers of charred lemon and dollops of uni butter. It’s served with a tin of Spanish clam conserva you can use to boost the pizza with bursts of briny clams. Though no good pizza requires dip, Pollack’s sidecars of ranch and chile crisp are welcome condiments for any stray pieces of crust.
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Bub and Grandma's Pizza
Highland Park Pizza Italian $
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
If you’ve been following Andy Kadin’s career, you know that his breads can be found at restaurants around the city, proudly identified on every menu. His Glassell Park Bub and Grandma’s restaurant is consistently bustling. He has the city’s bread lovers in a carb-padded choke hold I never want to quit. So it should come as no surprise that his sourdough pizzas possess a wonderful tang, and a durable crust that cracks with each fold and bite. Kadin developed his pizza dough alongside chef Jeff Whittaker, who previously cooked at Hippo and Bar Monette. For the Bolognese pizza, they slather the crust in a robust, meaty pork and beef ragu, with big boulders of meat protruding from the melted mozzarella. The porchetta pie is painted with a decadent garlic cream and cloaked in ribbons of porchetta, diced, charred broccolini and plenty of pepperoncini. It’s finished with a drizzle of garlic oil and a sprinkle of fennel salt. Imagine all the makings of a stellar porchetta sandwich in pizza form. For now, you can order pizza from a walk-up window and eat at one of the few patio tables along the sidewalk. But my colleague Stephanie Breijo recently reported that Kadin plans to open the dining room with an expanded menu in the spring of 2026.
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