Etna Slice House: An Amalgam of the Best Pittsburgh Pizza
Massimo is finding the perfect balance in pizza, business and life.
The Heroic Pizza Journey
What’s the best pizza in Pittsburgh? That’s a question I have a hard time answering. There’s so many different types of pizza being made in this city, it’s unfair to compare an Iron Born to a Mercurio’s. Some aspects overlap, but they are two distinct to say one is better than the other. My preferred pizza can even change depending on the weather. If it’s hot I crave the Pizzeria Davide sauce or a peach and corn pizza from Driftwood.
But what if there was a pizza shop that combined the best aspects of all the best pizza shops in the city. Could that work? Or, would it fail like when you combine all your favorite things into one bowl like you do as a kid. Froot Loops, chocolate milk, slice of cake, pop tart…sounds so good on paper…
Imagine a pizza shop that had the attention to detail and love of the craft of Mercurio’s, and also the bold flavors Iron Born. Not to mention the craftsmanship of award winning indie pizza maker, Eddie’s Pizza. Add in the carefully curated ingredients from Driftwood Oven and you have a dream pizza shop.
That’s a fantastical scenario, but Etna Slice House might be a place where pizza fantasies come true.
Etna Slice House is the Voltron of Pittsburgh pizza. Operated and owned by Massimo Vozza, he is taking years of pizza experience gathered from studying under the best in the city, to create a pizza product that delights Etna townies and blaze a trail for new pizza lovers.
Massimo’s journey to pizza shop owner is a wild one. He heard the call of the pizza early on and spent some time working at Iron Born for a bit where he learned from Pete Tolman. Pete is a highly accomplished pizza maker who creates pizza respected around the world. That’s a good person to learn how to make pizza from.
He learned dough tips from Pete and started making Neapolitan pizza in his home. He was getting good and thought about opening up a pizza shop in Shaler. The deal fell through and Angelo’s from Bloomfield ended up buying it. A pizza blessing when you hear what happens next.
At Iron Born they were talking about Eddie Stalewski’s pizza. You may be more familiar with his Instagram, Eddiespizza412. Massimo never had Ed’s pizza so he slipped into their DM’s and they started swapping pizza stories, Massimo got some pizza from Ed and built up a rapport based on a mutual love of pizza. Next time Massimo made his Neapolitan pizza he invited Ed over.
To have an extreme pizza influencer in your house watching you make pizza is nerve wracking. Despite Ed being the nicest, most humble human in existence, you still want to impress the guy. So Massimo is making pizza and rips the first two pizzas. I’ve done that, it’s scary and demoralizing. You feel like you can never make a pizza correctly after that. But Ed isn’t there to judge, he helps Massimo out. He even brought his own dough with his own blanket to keep the dough warm. That’s dedication.
Massimo gets a good pizza out and Ed is in love. He steers Massimo to Mercurio’s to take the next step on his pizza journey. Of course Massimo ends up in Mercurio learning how to make Neapolitan pizza from one of the best in the country in Michael Mercurio. He eventually ends up going to Pizza Expo, connecting with Nick Bogus of Caliente who gave him his book on how to open pizza shops.
Massimo has gone on a true Hero’s journey. He learned from the best, met adversity, and came out better in the end. This is living pizza literature.
Through it all Massimo gained years of knowledge and wisdom. The guy is humble and is laser focused on creating a perfectly balanced pizza. Opening up the shop after a huge pizza renaissance in the city and learning from the best to create an entirely original pizza is the right way to do it.
Massimo still reaches out to Pete, Michael and Ed when he needs tips and they are more than eager to help. He says, “They're so supportive because they saw some kid coming in, working at their spot, you know, and now I'm learning from them, taking their techniques and all their wisdom and just using it and seeing where it can take me.”
He found a spot in Etna, previously home to Pie Hole Pizza, and built a crew with his friend Marco, who also worked at Mercurio’s, his girlfriend, and a friend of his, Dominick. A rag tag crew that understands the assignment: make great pizza.
Crafting the Best Pizza Possible
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the building below houses an amazing, generation defining pizza, but that’s okay. You shouldn’t be judging pizza places by their cover anyways. You need to judge a pizza place by its plain pizza.
An underdeveloped entrance inspires hope in my stomach. This is clearly home to someone that is obsessed with pizza, so focused on creating an innovative and amazing slice of pizza that anything else falls by the wayside. It’s that dedication to the craft of pizza making that leaves the outside of the space looking sparse, but for the pizza curious your curiosity is rewarded.
Massimo grew up in Shaler eating Frank’s Pizza and Chicken, but was exposed to the wider world of Pittsburgh pizza thanks to a father who is a big pizza fan. Frank’s Pizza and Chicken is a pizza seemingly made on a dare of how much cheese can you put on a pizza. Mountains of cheese oozing off of the crust. It makes quite an impact on you.
“Frank’s Buffalo Chicken is my childhood stuff,” Massimo told me. And he spent a lot of time making a version of buffalo chicken on his menu based on that memory. But he’s doing it in his own balanced and thoughtful way.
“Pittsburghers want a lot of cheese on their pizza, they want like heavy, like very heavy. And coming from making Neapolitan style, Neapolitan style is like very balanced. You want that balance on everything.”
That is the core ethos to Massimo. Making pizza that is perfectly balanced, well thought out, restrained and making sure every element on the pizza is executed perfectly. He’s not putting some wild sauce on his pizza, it’s simple tomato sauce made from very good tomatoes.
He’s not throwing a bunch of cheese on his pizza, but he’s using very good cheese.
The flour is made with Caputo flour, high quality flour.
Every aspect of the pizza has been reviewed, assessed and executed with a divine passion for making the best pizza. And the dough is a great example of that level of perfect execution.
Etna Slice House offers up round and square pies. Both pizzas are made using the same dough, but slight difference in the preparation. Massimo starts with a poolish which adds flavor and a bit of sourness, once that’s mixed in the dough ferments and stretch the dough. After it sits for a while, the dough is stretched and sits again. The poolish speeds up the fermentation process, brings in some flavor so he can make dough without having to worry about storing multiple days worth of dough.
“If we had more space, I would consider maybe taking away the Polish or just using a little bit less just just for flavor, not really for any of the benefits,” Massimo says.
But the same dough is used for both types of pizza which adds a level of complexity - the dough is around 68 to 72 percent hydration. If you’ve worked with a high hydration dough you know the wetter the dough the harder it is to stretch. It’s gooey, like a thick mud, that is constantly trying to escape your grasps. If you’re making a Sicilian pizza it’s not a huge problem - you toss the quasi-solid mass into a pan and pop it into the oven. But if you’re making a round pizza you have to carefully maneuver that glob into an even circle. So Massimo and his crew are practicing like they’re training for the Olympics.
“And the big thing about it is it's tough, like for New York style stretching,” Massimo says of the stretching. “You gotta have a little experience for dough that high in hydration. But, you know, again, it's going to make a better dough like in the end. My team and everybody is very, like every day we're improving on stretching the dough out and like, you know, what's the best way, what's the best technique, not making it too thin.”
Start to finish, making a batch of dough takes Massimo and his crew thirty to forty-eight hours. That’s a lot of time and labor that goes into making a pizza. Massimo prices his pies appropriately, but not everyone that walks into the store reads this article or understands the craft that goes into putting out a simple looking pie. Massimo has to find that balance of pricing a well executed pizza in a neighborhood that isn’t the most affluent.
The Balance of Price
I spent a lot of time in Etna in my youth and even lived there with my dad and grandma for a bit after college. Three generations, one house. That’s classic living. We ate pizza a lot - either from Alioto’s or Frank’s Pizza and Chicken. My grandma had coupons scattered throughout the house and anytime I left she would hand me coupons for Subway just in case.
Frugality was a way of life in Etna. It’s an older area and the people that live there know how to scrape by and pay as little as they can for anything. Quality isn’t a huge concern especially if it impacts the price.
So what’s an artisan pizza shop to do? If you want to make the best product using the best ingredients, the pizzas need to be priced appropriately.
“Like all my stuff, it's not cheap and and like I do pay my people well and it's hard work,” Massimo explains. “I feel like some of the older folks in this community, they're not used to that price jump yet. So we do get a little pushback on that from some people, but at the same time, once they do try it, they're like yeah, my bad.”
Massimo told me a story of some people that came into the shop to pick up their pepperoni pizza and balked at the price: $23. They were skeptical and seemed angry, saying the pizza isn’t really good. That doesn’t phase Massimo anymore.
“You know, you get those comments and all that stuff all the time, but then they ended up eating it and they came back and they were like, hey, sorry, by the way, this was the best pizza I've ever had.” All it takes is one slice to convert a price-sensitive skeptic.
Massimo is working to convert the town of Etna into pizza aficionado one slice at a time.
Peak Pizza of Legend
Alright we are two thousands words in and let’s talk about the pizza. It’s important to understand how this pizza is created, the entire journey, to fully appreciate the pizza at Etna Slice House. What Massimo is accomplishing is only possible because of his eclectic background of working across various pizza disciplines. What sticks out to me is the round pizza. It has qualities that are both Neapolitan and New York style. It’s crushable, soft, chewy, but also has a nice crunch. I love the burnt edges.
Having the skill to handle a sticky dough and form it into a round dough comes from the Neapolitan background. Plus, the focus on balance with the ingredients is obvious here. It may look sparse but right under the surface is a battleground of flavors and zest waiting to light up your tastebuds. I’ve been craving a simple cheese pizza lately. Something light, saucy, but nothing was hitting. Biting into this activated my pizza sensors, it was what my body needed. I’d put it in the same conversation as Rockaway as far as simplicity executed perfectly.
The square pizzas held their own and were fun and delicious to eat. The spicy Calabrese wasn’t as spicy as I would have thought, which is a good thing for my innards. The cheese was on the excessive side, but on a thicker pizza you can get away with that. Despite it looking extravagant, I was able to digest and enjoy several slices of pizza without feeling bloated or sick. The pizza floated down with ease.
The pizzas originated from the same dough, but had completely different texture and feel. The square pies are proofed at room temperature slightly longer, but it’s borderline wizardry / advanced chemistry to be able to create such distinct versions of pizza.
The Italian hoagie was bomb. I regret to say that after eating this pizza with pals Jake and Chelsea, I put the leftovers away and forgot the hoagie in the refrigerator. I didn’t discover the rest of the hoagie until a week later. I was tempted to heat it up, but couldn’t risk destroying my body for one more bite of that hoagie. It was very close though.
A Journey Far from Over
Massimo is far from the end of his journey. His crew is really just getting up and running and he has plans to eventually get back into making Neapolitan pizza at scale. Maybe in Etna, maybe somewhere else. Probably a place with parking.
One day, maybe twenty years from now, there will be a young pizza maker trying to replicate Massimo’s version of the Buffalo Chicken Pizza and the cycle will continue.
It’s encouraging to see an era of pizza making sprout on the outskirts of the city. Inspired and encouraged by seasoned veterans, we are going to be seeing a lot more great pizza enter this region in the coming years.
Follow Etna Slice House and Massimo on Instagram for more pizza updates.
Okay this was a wild one. Huge thanks to Massimo for taking the time to chat with me. Check out the Etna Slice House! It's in Etna, right on Butler St.
Pizza ya later!
-Dan Tallarico, Pizza Journalist
Haha Voltron , I remember that, nice read🍕