One of the 18,236 reasons Mark and I get along so well is that we share a deep, passionate love for food and for the most part, we agree on what we like. (Our biggest divergence is around pork products, bacon in particular - but that's another story for another day.) Forget about the four basic food groups you learned about in elementary school, we've got our own: pizza, ice cream, breakfast and anything with butter. Sometimes these categories overlap, and all the better (though pizza-flavored ice cream doesn't sound all that great).
Pizza is by far my favorite food. I seriously think I could eat it every day. (My personal best to date is six days straight.) It's made up of three things I love - tomatoes, bread and cheese - how could anything made up of those ingredients be bad? I grew up in a smallish town on the Big Island of Hawaii where the only pizza place was Pizza Hut. (OK, there was also Magoo's, but no one ate the pizza there - it was all about hot ham & mushroom sandwich. But that too is another story for another day.) The choices when I went away to college in Des Moines, Iowa, weren't any better. We had a Pizza Hut near campus (where I worked waiting tables one summer), a Domino's and Home Team Pizza, a locally-owned shop that came into existence my sophomore year. The arrival of Home Team was a big story on campus since they seemed a better alternative to corporate pizza. At first, the quality was better - but by the time I graduated, you could barely tell the difference between their pizza and Domino's.
I feel fortunate to be living here in the Bay Area at a time when pizza is going through such huge renaissance. It seems like almost every week you hear of a new place opening, and they're all top-quality establishments - not the greasy, cheese-laden carb-fest joints that thrive around college campuses. Even a big player in the NYC pizza scene, Anthony Mangieri, closed his restaurant in the Big Apple to relocate to San Francisco. Una Pizza Napoletana will be opening in SOMA next March, and I can't wait to check it out!
Emilia's Pizzeria in Berkeley is the latest addition to the East Bay pizza scene, which is already an embarrassment of riches with Pizzaiolo, Dopo, Gioia, Marzano and Zachary's (among others) already enjoying ridiculous amounts of success. Emilia's owner Keith Freilich first learned the art of pizza making in his native New Jersey at the Hoboken outpost of Grimaldi's, which Zagat names the best pizza in New York. After spending 10 years or so interspersing a career in IT with pizza making, he moved to California and scored a job at Pizzaiolo a few months before they opened in 2005 - where he stayed until opening Emilia's last month.
It hasn't taken Emilia's long to establish a following. Pretty much every night Freilich tweets around 8 p.m. that he's run out of dough and is closing up shop. So finally after weeks of wanting to try it but not being able to make it in time, I planned ahead.
It turns out that Emilia's is located exactly two doors down from the dry cleaner where I take my clothes to get altered. I had taken in a few pairs of pants to be hemmed earlier in the week and planned to pick them up right before 5 p.m. on Saturday, closing time for the dry cleaner but opening time for Emilia's. My plan worked perfectly - or so I thought. I showed up at Emilia's at 4:50 p.m. and the door was open. I tried ordering a pizza but was told by Freilich (it's truly a one-man operation - the guy is the pizzaiolo, phone answerer and cashier) that he just started a new system today where he was taking orders in advance over the phone, and had so many orders already in that the earliest he could get me a pie would be 6:30. I quickly weighed my options. Did I *really* want to come back in an hour and a half after I planned the logistics of the visit so well? Not really. So I put on all the charm I could muster and gave him my sob story about how I had come ALL the way from OAKLAND (a whole two miles, tops, but you know, it's a big enough town where I could have come from far enough away to be a major inconvenience) and planned this trip a week ahead of time and how I kept wanting to come but he kept running out of dough before I could get there, yada yada yada. And you know, for Jersey guy, he sure was pretty nice about the whole thing. He squeezed me in and had my pizza ready in 20 minutes. And boy, am I glad I stuck to my guns and got that pizza.
Emilia's only does one size - 18 inches. No single slices. The pizza comes with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella and basil, and there are a few extra toppings that can be added which change from week to week. I got red peppers (because he had tweeted earlier this week that he wasn't sure how much longer he'd be offering them) and red onion.
The pizza is beautiful to look at and even better tasting. The crust is blistered and charred in places, just how I like it. It's also chewy and crisp, just how I like it. The sauce is flavorful and the peppers are roasted to perfection. There's just the right amount of cheese - it's doesn't take over the whole pizza and lets the taste of the toppings shine. I think it's the best pizza I've had here in East Bay in awhile; comparable to Pizzaiolo and Dopo in quality but a lot more accessible since it's basically just a take-out joint with only one thing on the menu. Getting a fully-loaded pie at Emilia's will at most cost you $30. If you go to Pizzaiolo or Dopo, you end up ordering salad, drinks and dessert and leave $70-100 poorer (although richer for the dining experience) and the pizza is much smaller.
Atmosphere-wise...well, there just isn't any. Emilia's is little more than a take-out counter. There are three small tables, but they were more probably more useful when he was doing slices, for people who just wanted a quick bite. This pizza should be enjoyed in the comfort of your own home.
Even with the new ordering ahead policy requiring you to plan ahead and the extra drive to Berkeley to pick it up, I can see Emilia's being our new go-to place for takeout pizza. After all, it's a lot closer than Gioia and I would say even better.
The deets: Emilia's Pizzeria is located at 2995 Shattuck Avenue (at Ashby) in Berkeley. Phone: 510-704-1794. They start taking orders at 4:00 p.m. Hours: 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. (or until they run out of dough), Tuesday-Saturday. Website: www.emiliaspizzeria.com, follow on Twitter @emiliaspizzeria.
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