Pizza Read With Me: Fried Pizza & Gorilla Pies

Pizza news, thought and updates around the Pittsburgh area from your local pizza journalist

Hi there!

I’m your local pizza journalist, Dan Tallarico. I’ve been on the pizza beat for over ten years doing my best to chronicle the growing pizza environment we have here in our fair city. If you’re curious about the newest shops that opened (and some that left) in the past year, you can read my Pittsburgh Pizza Guide Book.

Anyways, there’s a lot of moving, growing and shaking happening in the world of pizza. I’ll do my best to capture the latest events so you don’t miss a single slice of pizza news. If you haven’t subscribed yet, hit the button below to get these delivered to you on a regular basis.

Today we talk about a Pittsburgh-Style Pizzeria in Los Angeles, Spirit Pizza’s newest pizza invention, and a gold medal for Rico at Slice On Broadway.

With that out of the way, let’s talk pizza.

What is Pittsburgh Pizza? Maybe Someone in LA Figured It Out

Gorilla Pies in California, opened by Benjamin Osher in 2021 in Los Angeles, touts itself as L.A.’s only Pittsburgh-Style pizzeria. What could that possibly mean? Making a pizza while wearing a Pirates hat? I’m not sure there’s a consensus on what Pittsburgh pizza is inside of Pittsburgh.

I opened the Gorilla Pies menu looking for that special Pittsburgh flavor. Feeling so clever, I immediately hit CTRL+F and typed in “Pier” 0 results. I tried “Perogi” thinking they might use an alternative spelling. 0 results. I typed in “French”. 0 results. How can you have Pittsburgh-style pizza without french fries or pierogis crashing your pie?

Maybe there’s more to the pizza than what you eat. Maybe Benjamin is referring to the pizza’s soul.

According to Benjamin, his Pittsburgh-style pizza is less about ingredients and more the purpose of the pizza. In an interview with Eater he says, “Pittsburgh-style pizza, to me, it channels the ethos of a blue-collar life, about not being dainty. It’s over the top. Lots of ingredients, not a lot of rules.”

In another interview on The Positivity Report, Benjamin describes Pittsburgh-style pizza as using “lots of provolone” and the pizzas have “lots of toppings” and “we go hard in the paint.” Going “hard in the paint” is not a term that is thrown around here often since the only basketball franchise, The Condors, folded in 1972

Benjamin grew up in Squirrel Hill eating slices form Aiello’s and wants to emulate that grab-a-slice-and-hang environment in his own shop. While the concept wasn’t conceived here in Pittsburgh, I think what Benjamin is looking to emulate with Pittsburgh-style pizza is what we are all chasing when we eat pizza: a slice reminiscent of the pizza you ate at your birthday’s growing up.

Pittsburgh pizza could not be less defined, and the pizzas at Gorilla Pies don’t look like anything I’ve seen in Pittsburgh. Pizza enthusiasts are trapped in a hunt for the pizza of their youth. The one slice they can bite into and relive their 10th birthday party, a friend’s sleep over and the carefree glory days before you ever had to worry about taxes. And maybe that’s that Gorilla wearing a Pirate’s hat offers up to the customer.

Spirit R&D Experiments with Fried Pizza

The brains at Spirit never cease to amaze me. Their menu is home to radical and unique specialty pizzas that seem conjured from another dimension. The infamous Butt Patrol (slow roasted pork butt, mozzarella, caciocavallo, picked red onion, fennel pollen, parsley) or my current favorite, the Bickle (red sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni, candied jalapeño, ranch). On paper these sound intense and implausible. In reality, they are a pleasure sensation.

Spirit is always thinking of new ways to get pizza into bodies. In the past year they’ve started to offer round pies to complement their sheets of grandma pies. They also debuted a “Rollie.” The Rollie is a rolled pizza, kind of like a calzone, filled with onions, cheese, peppers, seitan, buffalo sauce and a side of ranch.

This is important, because the Rollie seems to have been the blueprint for Spirit’s newly developed fried pizza.

Their fried pizza is calzone-esque. It’s a folded piece of dough and ours was filled with jalapeños, pepperoni and mozzarella. Accompanying it was a side of ranch perfect for cooling off the hot crusty exterior of the pizza.

The folded pizza dough is dipped in the deep fryer for about a minute on each side. Just enough to brown the exterior without hardening it too much. Biting into it is soft, a light crunch, almost like a tamale. The strange thing about the fried pizza is that it simply melts together. In the vat of grease it transforms into a single entity, everything is one complete being. A being that can’t wait to slide down your esophagus.

The Fried Pizza is on the menu on Monday’s as part of Spirit’s “FRIED Mondays.” Very catch and my new favorite flavor of Monday. Will they expand to fry other days of the week? Who knows, but if you show up on a Monday you can grab one of these Fried Pizzas for $10. Great way to pull out of the Monday Slump and taste pizza in a way you haven’t before.

Gobble Gobble, Rico Lunardi of Slice On Broadway Takes Home the Gold

You may not know it, but there are pizza competitions happening all the time around the country. Lately these competitions have gone virtual due to the pandemic.

In a recent virtual competition, Rico Lunardi won first place for his Thanksgiving Gobble Pie, a pizza covered in Thanksgiving staples like cranberry, stuffing, gravy and turkey. Knowing Rico, I’m sure this is tastefully done and probably taste pretty good. No word on if it’ll end up on the menu, but you can read more about the competition here.